"46th Biennial Exhibition: Media/Metaphor"
2000-12-09 until 2001-03-05
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Washington, DC, USA

In our culture we are experiencing a shift in how we view the world. Everything, it seems, is traveling at the speed of light. Information comes from anywhere at any time. We are connected together and kept apart—both physically and metaphorically—in ways that were never dreamed of fifty years ago. We are moving away from the land, where tiny changes are charged with meaning, to work and live in wired communities where change is taken for granted. Our icons are evolving, their foundations transformed, mediated by new tools that serve as mirrors, allowing us to see ourselves in new ways. Yet we still carry with us the memories and stories that bind the past and present.

Media/Metaphor features new experiments by fifteen artists who live and work in the United States: Shimon Attie, Victor Burgin, Y. David Chung, Chuck Close, Sharon Daniel, Nan Goldin, Gary Hill, Vik Muniz, David Reed, Michal Rovner, Ben Sakoguchi, Lorna Simpson, Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson, and Lisa Yuskavage. Their work examines a variety of questions about how we see and construct our world from all the information we receive. How do the fundamental changes in how we live and communicate affect our perceptions, relationships, and actionsNULL What role does technology play in refocusing and reshaping our ideasNULL How do new forms of expression emerge from traditions and how is our culture and the art it engenders affected by themNULL

From its inception in 1907, almost one hundred years ago, the Corcorans Biennial Exhibition has presented contemporary American painting, emphasizing its importance as a creative process within the context of American visual culture. In its previous forty-five installments the exhibition has examined this one expressive medium as it evolved through a century of explosive scientific, technological, and cultural growth. At the dawn of a new era the themes of the exhibition have been redrawn, to look at the art of our time at this key transitional moment.

Each of the artists in Media/Metaphor looks to the traditions and language of art, building upon conventions to investigate their interests in groundbreaking ways. They use a variety of tools: paintbrushes, photographs, cameras, video, computers, imaging software, digital printers, and the Internet. Ideas and direction from one medium influence the others, meshing fluidly at times and colliding at others.

Each of these artists confronts and refers to artistic traditions in a variety of ways. In doing so, they create new models that extend the meaning of painting, photography, and photo-based media into alternate spheres. Historic forms, such as the photographic daguerreotype, merge here with contemporary paintings, cinema-size multi-channel video projections, and the Internet to speak about the intricate relationships between traditional and contemporary media.

-Philip Brookman
Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts

IMAGE:
Shimon Attie
Untitled (from White Nights, Sugar Dreams), 2000
color coupler print
Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery
© Shimon Attie

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of District of Columbia

Other Important Exhibitions in Washington