13 - Center for Photography at Woodstock - THE FRUSTRATION OF EXPRESSION with GARY HILL

For Immediate Release

CONTACT
Ariel Shanberg or Akemi Hiatt
(845) 679-9957 or info@cpw.org

PRESS IMAGES AVAILABLE
UPON REQUEST

THE FRUSTRATION OF EXPRESSION
featuring GARY HILL
with newly commissioned works by
MARILLA ABRAHAMSON, WILL LYTLE, ANTHONY MORELLI, KAELA SMITH, & TAIMA SMITH
a collaboration with the iNDIE Media Program

hill

ON VIEW: NOVEMBER 13 - DECEMBER 23, 2010

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY NOVEMBER 20, 2010, 4-6pm

PANEL TALK WITH EXHIBITION ARTISTS: SATURDAY NOVEMBER 20, 2010, 2:30pm
at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum
28 Tinker Street, Woodstock, NY

The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition The Frustration of Expression, an exciting collaboration between CPW, the iNDIE Media Program, and renowned video artist Gary Hill.

Curated by Dorota Czerner and featuring works by former participants in the iNDIE Media Program, The Frustration of Expression brings back to Woodstock one of the most renowned voices in contemporary video art and an artist who spent his formative artistic years in Woodstock, New York, home to one of the nation's longest running artist colonies.

The exhibition will feature Gary Hill's Wall Piece (2000) a complex multifaceted installation which features the artist hurtling himself against a wall, uttering a single word from a prepared monologue. With each impact a strobe flashes, both complicating and articulating the moment Hill simultaneously hits the wall and utters a word.

With Wall Piece as the exhibitions "center piece", the five selected alumni of the iNDIE Media Program working with Czerner and iNDIE Director Russell Richardson, have created newly commissioned pieces both in response to Hill's work and focused on addressing "the frustration of expression", particularly in connection to having grown up in Woodstock. Their video installations, created specifically for this exhibition, explore the terrain of adolescent expression and the obstacles - both external and internal - to that expression. The development of these pieces can be followed by clicking here, as Richardson accompanies his former students and uses his own camera to capture the complex process of artistic creation.

As Dorota Czerner notes in the exhibitions curatorial statement, With the Aquarian paradise tangled before them in beaded necklaces, young people of Woodstock grow up knowingly listening through the gap between myth and reality. The disjuncture between the town, and its own essential happening, generates nostalgia for the absent story.

Based in Seattle, WA, renowned video artist Gary Hill (b. 1951) could be described as the "original iNDIE kid". As a young adult, Hill migrated to Woodstock in the late 1960's from the West Coast. Hill - who has often been quoted as saying that he wouldn't have made it through high school if it were not for the freedom to create and explore that was given to him by such mentors as his teacher Mr. Pelster - as a young man represented the very archetype of an iNDIE student. Further disaffected by his formal educational experience at the college-level, and highly apt in the arts, Hill was drawn to Woodstock as an idyllic art colony. His metal work and sculpture works of the time can still be found amongst many individuals throughout our region. In the early 1970's, Hill became involved in Woodstock's art community, first at the Artist Students League, the Woodstock Artist Association, and at Woodstock Community Video, an early video art collective and production studio. His ongoing work explores an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia, and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. Since his formative time in Woodstock, Hill has gone on to be one of the most regarded video artists in the world.

This collaboration with Hill and CPW marks a new step in bringing iNDIE's efforts to utilize video as an expressive tool for teens that have fallen out of the mainstream educational system. Hill's performative and sculptural explorations of language and methods of expression are an ideal catalyst for engaging a generation of creative youth who are steadfastly developing a singular relationship to their "screens". Whether it be cell phones, TVs, iPods, or the like, this collaboration will encourage participating students (and inspire audiences) to consider the expressive capabilities of video as art installation and surpass their day-to-day role as consumers.

A Tannersville resident, Marilla Abrahamsen (b. 1994) has spent much of her social and educational life in Woodstock. In her piece Ghost of Waltz (2010), Abrahamsen has created an installation consisting of a cluttered shelf crowded with highly personal, opaque and fetishistic objects. In a central shadow box, a "retro" video monitor plays distorted phantasmagorical images featuring a shrouded couple, blindly wandering along cliff edges, detailing their movement and producing a gaze which evokes longing and discomfort.

Will Lytle (b. 1986) grew up in the woods of West Hurley. His video work involves layering, textual interpolation and a deeply subjective view of life, nature, and human relationships, all marked with a searching melancholy and wistful joy. For this exhibition, Lytle has created Aer/Aure (2010), a tall out-house shaped video installation, open at a curtained vignette at the top with a cluster through which viewers are required to insert their heads to see the monitors placed at the base of the installation. Thematically, the piece plays with the electric line between the natural introversion of the artist and the extroversion necessary to communicate with an audience.

A Chichester resident and photography devotee Anthony Morelli's (b. 1992) work is deceptively simple, operating on a visceral level as well as being able to carry a more cerebral description. For this exhibition, Morelli has created a piece which examines the concrete/imaginary problem of obstacles. Three projections featuring concrete, everyday objects are projected onto cloth screens. Their apparent solidity and reality (and thus their threat as obstacles to the observer) is at odds with their existence as purely visual or ideal phenomena. The visitor is required to confront these images by literally brushing them aside or remain transfixed by their imagined corporeality.

Kaela Smith (b. 1992) recently returned to the area after a year at Cal Arts in Santa Monica. For The Frustration of Expression, Smith has created a video triptych which employs the inside/outside dichotomy, especially as pertaining to barriers and obstacles (seen and unseen). Each set of images will be a different expression of a selected set of text. The middle component represents the source of the expression, the voice of the text, looking outward from the proverbial "fishbowl" while struggling to express adequately what is stuck on the tip of the tongue. The two outer screens represent two different interpretations, looking into the text/bowl.

Taima Smith (b. 1979) grew up in Woodstock in the 1980s and 90s. Her piece examines the summer cult of swimming holes, both from the point of view of the teenagers who take refuge there, and through the filter of her own nostalgia - having done the same thing in the same places, but a decade earlier. The installation, a tent-like structure, features two entrances, one at each end. In the center, back to back, are two monitors. One shows sequences of youths in swimming holes, above the water and underwater, and captures the floating sensation of an out of time, endless summer. The other takes the same footage, but treats it "esthetically" using time manipulation, looping, speed variation, and layering to give a more mediated, less personal view.

Established in 1999, iNDIE provides hands-on educational offerings which allows youth between 16 and 23 years of age to come together, work on media projects - chiefly video - and interact with mentors from the local community. CPW is pleased to have had a history of collaborating with the program since its inception including hosting special screenings and curated exhibitions. To learn more about iNDIE, visit www.indieprograms.org.

Additional programs including a screening of Hill's single channel video work will be presented. Details to be announced.

This exhibition is made possible in part the generous support of private and public lenders and with funds from the Electronic Media & Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts , a state agency, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts

Founded in 1977, the Center for Photography at Woodstock is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 artist-centered organization dedicated to supporting artists working in photography and related media and engaging audiences through opportunities in which creation, discovery, and education are made possible. To learn more, visit www.cpw.org.