[Nettime-ro] Fw: iscp newsflash!

["Pro Helvetia Bucuresti" <phbuc@pcnet.ro>]

Title: iscp newsflash!

 

-----Original Message-----
From: ISCP <ispnyc@concentric.net>
To: The World <ispnyc@concentric.net>
Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 7:11 PM
Subject: iscp newsflash!

newsflash! international studio & curatorial program (iscp)

Opening Friday, November 22, 2002, 7 - 10 pm
through January 5, 2003

Lin de Mol  & Gabriele Nagel
Photography and Video Installations

presented by
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
97 North 9th Street (Berry & Wythe Ave.)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211
T. 718-782 4100
F. 718-782 4800
www.priskajuschkafineart.com

From Germany and the Netherlands, respectively, Gabriele Nagel
and Lin de Mol came together during their 2001- 02 residency at the
International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP). Besides sharing
a personal affinity, both artists work in video and photography; both focus
on landscapes and the human body.  But here the similarities end.

Though Gabriele Nagel, born in Dresden, Germany, is a Berlin- based artist,
the setting of her works is indefinite.  In "Someone-Nowhere," anonymous
figures populate landscapes nonspecific enough to stand in for any place,
from Switzerland to Idaho.  The medium of these works and the video "Clean
Up. Clear Up." is similarly difficult to pin down.  All of these works
belong to a long history of camera-assisted painting that includes Vermeer
and Warhol.  From original photographs, Nagel digitally transformed the
landscapes in "Someone-Nowhere" into flattened, simplified, coloring book
images, which she then filled in with simple colors.  Her "Clean up.  Clear
up.", on the other hand, started as video but looks like animation, a
comparison emphasized by a few simple, comic sound effects.

This blurring of boundaries continues in Nagel's "Milkyway Comeshot," a
video that transforms portrait photography into action painting.  A series
of 11 men, their heads and torsos bare, lie on colored sheets.  Although
their faces express varying degrees of amusement, each one gives off the
same air of anticipation -- until the cold, milky payoff. Actually, it's
more like a payback.  Either way, the piece is an extended meditation on
role reversals and the pleasures and discomforts of bodily fluids.

Lin de Mol's dream-like imagery creates a series of narratives whose languid
surrealism contrasts Nagel's quirky immediacy.  In "Lions and Frogs," for
example, a living room similar to the one installed in the gallery is the
setting for a fractured domestic mise-en-scene featuring a man and a woman
passing through the space like disturbed spirits.  "Warm & Tender Love"
leaves a similarly unsettling impression.  Its bowl of slowly flaming fruit,
accompanied by the Percy Sledge song, which gave the work its title, is a
siren's call, simultaneously seductive and destructive.

Relying even more on sensuous visual display, her series of landscapes
mounted in light boxes collage endoscopic photos of the human heart with
scenery from exotic locales across the globe.  The resulting images are lush
and gorgeous in their impossibility.  Dividing the gallery space are two of
de Mol's botanical photos ­ "Obesa Monstrose" and "Pinyon Pine" -- unaltered
and printed on voile curtains.  Their conflation of interiority and
exteriority perfectly sums up the contradictory impulses in her work.


Gallery hours: Monday-Thursday, 12- 6 p.m. or by appointment.