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Libby Pratt’s ICP/Bard MFA Thesis Exhibition 2/23/12
Round And Around
Reply
Christian Erroi and Nica Ross discuss her ICP/Bard MFA thesis show opening March 1, 2012 6:30PM-10PM.
Christian Erroi: First, why don’t you tell me what kind of shape it will have?
Nica Ross: What’s happening? Well, it is more of a set, or a construction. Not to say that I am going to use 2x4s and construct a fort, or something. Maybe I should, but I’m not.
There’s photo, there’s video, there’s a performative aspect. And I’m going to be involved in it throughout the night, and there will also be a little book, printed matter, which I just got on the press this morning…I am pretty excited about that.
CE: Do you have a title?
NR: “Holding the Post for all my Selenas.”
CE: What are Selenas?
NR: To me, because there’s other uses of that word, to me Selena is a huge Tejana pop-singer who was murdered by her number one fan, who had become really close to her, and had become part of the organization that kept her going in terms of pop stardom. The fan became obsessed with her, and ended up killing her when Selena tried to cut her out of the picture.
She was a significant pop star while I was growing up in Arizona, and when she was murdered, she became such a martyr. All the kids in my school were wearing t-shirts that said “Forever Selena” and it was like, “Rest in Peace, Selena” and Kurt Cobain had just committed suicide, and then Tupac Shakur died.
They all died within a short time of each other, and so it seemed like every kid at some point in my sixth grade was walking around with some pop star martyr t-shirt.
The show is a construction of a world that is built by propaganda, by iconography, by Selenas and Kurt Cobains, and Berlusconis, and Qadaffis, and Ronald Reagans. You know, it’s our world, but also not our world.
CE: Yes, what surrounds us – what surrounded us!
NR: I love that you were going to ask me what I would I do if Mitt Romney came, because he would be perfect in the show! If he came, I would put him in the bathroom. I would just have him there, in the bathroom. If people come to see the show, or check out the photos on the blog, you will see why.
The whole show consists of an artificial world that is very reminiscent of the real world, and it stems out of my fascination with science fiction, fantasy and news. I read sci fi and news almost exclusively. I could probably easily switch those two and not know it. So, that’s what the show is about, really.
CE: How many rooms will it be?
NR: I am using all of the space, really, from when you enter…
I am audio-visual nerd, so there will be live video aspects, and in the construction of the set…I have a lot of production experience, and really started working with visual media in High School where I ran a television and recording studio. My personal resources stem from production, and that’s also really how I like to work with things. One could call it “butching out.” I just want to be a part of it.
CE: In High School? That’s great!
NR: I love to put on a show. My mother ran a theatre, so I grew up backstage. Grew up in the control booth, and that was my favorite way to experience a show.
I have a background in filmmaking I am very production heavy, behind the scenes heavy & when I go to make something happen…
It’s interesting to be in a photography school because I am not so focused on photography as a medium, but I’ve learned a lot about photography surrounded by photographers.
CE: Yeah, I have seen your images. They are pristine, and, yet, it is not only about them, because they seem to have importance of their own.
NR: I mean I think that being in photography – when I first started here. I have to admit, my first year I was so over photography. I didn’t really get it. I took a lot of photos going into this program. I entered a photography program. And it made me start questioning photography and why even do such a thing.
CE: Well, Nayland is not a photographer…
NR: Yes, the program is so wide open, and I have been given a lot of space for experimentation. Yet, I am showing a lot of photos.
I have come around to a different understanding of what the action of photography is and how that acts upon the viewer.
In this show I am using the photographs as scenes. There aren’t really people in them. There are no protagonists in the photos, but I would say that there are protagonists in the show who are both the performers and viewers.
I’ve set it up so that there are huge photos that are acting as the scenery that one can place oneself in.
CE: Do you appear?
NR: Me? I will appear in the live video, and I’m going to be engineering the show. I will be a part of the show.
CE: Good!
NR: I will be protagonist, but so will you, or anybody else who enters the space. It’s almost like a holodeck!
CE: What’s that?
NR: You know, like on Star Trek Enterprise, the holodecks? I’d rather create a space like that, where we could go, and create different spaces? If I could have a holodeck, that would be the ideal show.
NR: The publication that goes along with the show is blue, and is inspired by the little mono-colored books that go along with a lot of different authoritarian or ideologically based regimes…there always seems to be a little book…
CE: Sure, a manifesto of some sort…
NR: A manifesto…a constitution…just everything’s going to be contained in there. The idea of the booklet is to contain the show, so these are all of the photos and the performance aspects of the show. I am not revealing something that happens in the show, because I kind of want people to come and experience it.
CE: What about the building?
NR: There’s a sculptural element, as well, in the show. On the flier is the diagram that I sent to the carpenter, who is my father. He built this and sent it to me from Chicago.
CE: Oh my!
NR: And there are a lot of people in the show.
There’s Selena. Ghandi, Audrey Lord, Terry Gilliam, Frida Kahlo, Colin Powell, Sarah Palin, Oprah, John Wayne, Mao, Laurie Anderson.
They are all cultural icons somehow and someone believes in them…someone’s following their ideology in some way, be it the ideology of partying or sex or communism.
CE: Sure sure. You’re going all over the place, from extreme right to left.
NR: Everything in between, and to athletes, writers, etc.
CE: And who is the artist you mostly follow?
NR: In terms of a practice that I really like? I really appreciate Robert Wilson’s practice. Do you know who he is?
CE: No.
NR: He is a director – an avant-garde experimental theatre director. First of all it’s really beautiful work and really kind of revolutionary in terms of theatre practice. I like working with an ensemble in a whole variety of methods. I come from a theatre family, so, I feel like when I think of a show I think of people and setting and things like that…
CE: That sounds fun.
Robert Wilson © Lesley Leslie-Spinks
NR: Yeah, there’s gonna be live video and I will be working with real live people, but there will still be a mediated form of it that everyone will actually be seeing live, and through that interaction I hope something will be exposed. That is something what I am interested in – that mediation.
CE: Oh, so you will be doing video in the space, as it happens?
NR: Yes, there will be video cameras, and I will also be directing the video as it happens, and recording it at the same time, so that it will exist in the space after the opening night. It will exist in the space and on view a couple of days, so the performers won’t be available, but the remnants of their presence will.
CE: That’s great. So when is the show?
NE: The opening is March 1st, which is a Thursday from 6:30PM till 10:00PM and is on view Friday and Saturday from 12PM to 5PM. People should feel free to come by.
Libby Pratt’s thesis exhibition, Round and Around opens this Thursday at ICP Studios
Libby Pratt, Griffith Telescope, 34″ x 42,” 2011.
First year Kate Levy sat down with second year Libby Pratt to discuss Libby’s thesis show, open this Thursday, February 23rd until Sunday, February 26th.
Kate Levy: Libby, can you tell me a bit about what you’d hope the viewer to get from this interview and by attending your show?
Libby Pratt: The work is really pulled from a lot of different ideas and projects I’ve been interested in. I am making a lot of internal connections in my brain.
I think what I’m finding for myself is that this exhibition a test of faith; I have to trust my decisions in what I’m choosing to make people look at, which is daunting. You are asking to create a reality which is understandable. A reality and a language. You have trust that your language is a global language. Everyone reads work so differently, and they bring a lot of personal information, biases and experiences to the work. I would like viewer to have their own experience with the work. If we can find the common thread, and they can jump on my boat and sail with me for a while, that would be really exciting.
KL: Can you talk a bit about any external influences on your work for this show?
LP: I saw Carlos Motta and Andrea Geyer in conversation at this year’s Symposium/UnConference. Watching their videos hugely informed how I am editing my video, in particular, the series entitled Six Acts, and Experiment in Narrative Justice. In Carlos’s work, he hires an actor to reenact political speeches that were made years and years ago. There’s this dislocation of time. The actors are giving the speech in public spaces. People approach the speaker as someone who can help them. They believe the person is a political candidate.There’s this interesting thing that happens when Carlos has to come into the video, and explain what’s happening, so you see the machinations of the video, its structure. In my edit of my video, I paid a lot of attention to the structure, the moments where we are starting and stopping and waiting for things to begin.
KL: It seems like looking at form in a non-visual way, as the narration and parameters around your content is an integral part of your process.
LP: Yes. I was really dissatisfied with the content of my footage. I videotaped myself and my siblings telling stories.We were speaking off the cuff, but it felt flat and contrived. The edit became about demonstrating my discontent, and showing the failure of the footage.
KL: So you are repurposing the footage to explore structure and failure?
LP: In some ways, I feel like I’m sucking the bone dry, I’m squeezing the lemon until I get all the juice.
KL: Are you stripping it down in a way that reveals something else, or are you struggling with it until there is nothing left, until you get to that point when we just say, fuck it.
LP: I don’t know if there will be a reveal.
KL: Lets talk about the Skype video you showed at this past open studios .
LP: The Skype video was really about how we can or can’t transcend distance and retain intimacy. It was about familial relationships and the closeness I have with my siblings. But it was also about the breakdowns that happen within these relationships via the internet. And yet we are acting intimate and talking about things that are intimate. My siblings didn’t know I was recording them. I know what’s happening, that at some point I will listen to the recording, so I am automatically self conscious. But they aren’t.
KL: How has all of this evolved into the new video you are showing in your exhibition?
LP: There’s also this component of distance in the installation of my new video. The viewer will view the video is from a physical distance in the space. There will also be a distance in how you will hear the video. I was thinking a lot about this article that David Deitcher assigned about Felix Gonzales Torres by Miwon Kwon. She wrote this beautiful thing about intimacy and distance, and how they work in FGT’s work. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. When you have these intimate relationships, what is the experience for the viewer. What’s it like for someone watching on the outside, how do you enter that?
KL: I think that’s the same question of whether or not people are going to see the connections in the world you’ve created for the viewer. How you enter intimacy within a piece is perhaps the same as how you enter a piece. Can you talk briefly about the images in the show?
LP: These images are really about paying attention to seeing. About where we touch down in the journey of our lives, and how we continue through to the next life. The show is titled “Round and Around.”
KL: As in death, and rebirth?
LP: The work is not just about death, but about moving.
“dfghfhg”
Most of the work from my thesis show “dfghfhg” can be seen online:
- Sears presents dfghfhg
- Dither Studies
- Unichar
- r8j4lf
- Containment
- Meanwhile, in NYC…
- The Alphabet in Alphabetical Order
- Mutator 1
- Internet Directory
- Chatter
- YouTube Limericks
- Light Pattern: Hello, World
- A Choice
- Glitchometry
- Drunk Eliza
- Unicode Frenzy
More photos from the event:
It was possibly the last speed show at 90 Bowery, as they’re expected to sell that side room.
me with Cory Arcangel and JODI. Love the Moiré on my shirt.
“dfghfhg”
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Daniel Temkin’s ICP/Bard MFA Thesis Exhibition at Internet Cafe 2/13/12
Interview with Michi Jigarjian
Recently, Michi Jigargian’s solo thesis show was presented at our graduate studios space in Long Island City. The show was comprised of a selection of printed photographs, a small zine, and a large scale installation. She describes the installation and comments on her experience in the interview below.
The site specific installation is entitled Alone Together and occupies the main gallery space where the weekly critiques take place. There are over 3,000 anchors created from the pre-exsisting holes made the semester before. Suspended from the ceiling is a clear elastic structure which is woven through the highest holes on the wall. There are two long elastic strings that suspend from the top holes to the bottom creating an obstruction of space.
You’ve stated that your thesis show, “From Ours To Yours” is about the fragile connections created, disrupted and broken within the process of daily life. Could you expand upon the role of “fragile connections” in these works?
Recently I looked back at my journals from high school and I came across a note that read, “I need distractions to find connections” This is a seed of a thought that has quietly but continuously haunted me through its’ evolution in my life.
A photograph itself is one of the most fragile attempts to fix or connect a moment. Moyra Davey reminds us in her book, Long Life Cool White, that Barthes used the expression for an equivalent of a “photograph”: an image “expressed (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light.”
This is something that I really wanted to explore in my installation. I chose an elastic clear string to weave a drop ceiling in the room, which created a web of shadows against the wall. The shadows were the most important part for me. They hinted at the idea of a photograph.
How was the experience of creating the installation in the gallery space? Exhausting? Exhilarating?
The main gallery space is also used for our weekly critiques. In the site-installation, Alone Together, I make reference to the history of the room’s trajectory through recreating the holes we collectively made the semester before.
I photographed the walls before they were refinished at the end of the semester and then projected them onto the wall to remake the holes. There were about 3,167 in the end, so yes very exhausting. My fingers and hands were cramping and I had to get some help to finish the last wall. It took about 13 hours total.
In the end, I was happy that I did it mostly by myself because I was able to find unexpected patterns, mappings and locations of the different holes by simply spending time with them.
The zine that is available in the show seems integral to understanding the works as a whole. Please talk about the role of writing in your practice as an artist.
Writing has always been a part of my life, mostly in the form of note taking and short stories. I use it to hear to myself think. In the show, I wanted my words to point towards a connection between the photographs and the installation; without saying too much. The intentional gaps of space and sparsely laid out text were to provide a break or disruption.
The photographs in the zine are of my notebook or books that I am reading. Sontag wrote, “ A photograph could also be described as a quotation.”
A quotation is a form of repetition. I am interested in the break of that repetition within ones own thoughts. So, I close the zine with a photograph of an underlined passage from Sara Ruddicks essay entitled Talking about Mothers:
According to the philosopher C.S. Pierce, we think when we are disturbed and the aim of our thinking is to recover our equilibrium, if it is conflict and trouble that spur thought, then to describe a work to articulate its thinking means looking for its disturbances among its routines.
In the printed zine you write, “try to stay in the lines, make better use of your time, try to stay organized”. Why is it important to be organized and stay between the lines?
In the sentence directly after the self-instructions you referenced, I actually break or ignore them.
It reads, “Recently on top of one of the pages I found the self- instructions, “try to stay in the lines, make better use of your time, try to stay organized.” Directly below is a drawing that filled the whole page and slipped into the crease of the next. “
Some of the most interesting things happen from straying outside the lines but I am still interested in what happens inside them.
Daniel Temkin’s thesis show took place in another dimension
On Monday February 13th around 7:30 pm, after strolling in fascination through the small, winding, bustling streets of Chinatown, I found my destination. Daniel Temkin’s MFA thesis show was taking place down one flight of stairs in an internet cafe on Bowery at the foot of the majestic Manhattan bridge. Upon entering the basement cafe there were three rooms visible. Two were occupied by [mostly] Chinese men chatting and sitting at computers. There was a faint smell of cigarettes. Behind the register were piled numerous small bags of potato chips (I wanted gum, sadly they didn’t have any back there). I felt a little bit out of place, in an exciting way. As one of my peers aptly noted: it felt like being in another time. I made a quick right and found myself surrounded by familiar faces. Suddenly I was part of the underground world. I then picked up a photocopied sheet of paper with a list of URLS and made my way to one of the 16 computers in the room displaying Daniel’s show. Other students and strangers mingled around while finding computers and beginning to explore the task at hand of viewing an MFA thesis show in a totally new way. Then ensued a surprising exploration of coded programs, feigned shopping websites, gifs of piles of discarded computer screens, and of course, some photographs.
The all encompassing show can be experienced (minus the 90 Bowery atmosphere) here: http://dfghfhg.com/dfghfhg/
http://dfghfhg.com/meanwhileinnyc/
http://dfghfhg.com/drunkeliza
http://dfghfhg.com/sears
Daniel Tempkin, Dither, 2011.
And a few words from Daniel reveal how we were led to the Bowery in the first place:
Winona: Tell me about the title of your show:
Daniel: dfghfhg comes from keyboard mashing, running your fingers randomly across consecutive keys. People do it as a placeholder for real text (lorem ipsum), or as a refusal to answer a question. It’s a form of communication that didn’t exist before the web. Like much of the work in my show, it builds on unintended uses and consequences of technology.
WBB: How would you describe the work:
DT: In my photographic work years ago, I created a series of postcards that reflect the generic commercialism that was slowly making NYC feel the same as many other cities. I see the same pattern in the Web, which is becoming increasingly commercial — it can be a boring place to spend time, but it holds the promise of something amazing around the corner which often never materializes. The underlying technology is strange and surprising when misused, something I explore in some pieces. Other pieces bridge online life and the city. My “Meanwhile, in NYC” piece recreates NYC as an endless series of drab backdrops populated by a dispassionate but very strange, aging generation. These scenes are quintessential New York, they couldn’t have been shot anywhere else, and for me there’s a charm both to their monotony and their eccentricities. I present it as an ever-changing collage, using a lo-fi DIY web style, that reflects the same sensibility in the web.
Daniel Temkin, Meanwhile in NYC, 2012
WBB: Why exhibit at the internet cafe in Chinatown?
DT: I wanted to get away from creating rareified art objects, and from making work that spoke too much about art itself. Pieces in the show include ordinary objects: cardboard iPads as frames for my images, a phone directory. If I had been unable to find an internet cafe to work with, I was hoping to show the work in a closed office at night, bring up the work in cubicles. I wanted to avoid the baggage that comes with the gallery.
WBB: What is Speedshow and what led you to show on it, how did you get involved,
etc.?
DT: A speedshow is just a pop-up exhibition in an internet cafe. It was Aram Bartholl’s concept. He, and Lindasy Howard, who has also curated such shows in NYC, gave valuable advice on getting the show together. Also, Saskia Aldinger helped by promoting the show on the speedshow.net website.
WBB: Tell me about your philosophy regarding modern computer interaction and its
effect on our culture:
DT: It used to be only programmers who had to negotiate with the computer, taking on its compulsive logic in order to communicate with it. We all do this now, as we manage more of our lives on online — sorting our friends into distinct groups that have no meaning off the computer, for example. The web has been great for human communication, but it comes with a price. My programming languages speak to the messier aspects of human communication, those that are harder to represent in a logical system: bodily gesture and nuance.
