From October 28, 2000, to January 15, 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art (SFMOMA) will present Double Feature: New Works by Nick Crowe and Gary Hill.
Organized by Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA curator of media arts, the exhibition spotlights
The New Medium by Nick Crowe and Gary Hill's Remembering Paralinguay (with
Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) Notes Weil, These two works were not conceived as
one exhibition, but the juxtaposition of the installations provides a fascinating
examination of our relationship to an increasingly abstract social structure.
Nick Crowe
The New Medium, 2000
This new work by Nick Crowe reveals a fascination with funereal culture
on the Web. The New Medium focuses on text messages sent by
friends and relatives to recently deceased loved ones who have been
uploaded--not to heaven, but to the Internet.
The New Medium consists of a series of 15 glass panels hand-engraved
with screenshots of selected Web pages pulled from the Internet. Wall-hung
and illuminated, these Web pages appear as fragile line drawings
rendered in shadow in an environment washed with white light, suggesting
a dematerialized and unearthly context. The New Medium examines
a growing spiritual investment in cyberspace, in which the computer
becomes a medium through which to speak to the dead.
A number of Web sites currently serve as memorials that may be visited
for years to come. Examples include the worldwide cemetery at www.cemetery.org
and Imminent Domain at www.imminentdomain.com.
Previous projects by Crowe include The Citizens, 1999, an investigation
of personal home pages, published as a book by Book Works and as a
downloadable film by Channel. The artist also coproduced Mugger
Music, a performance in New York City commissioned by the Lower
Manhattan Cultural Council. He recently exhibited The 10 Point
Plan for a Better Helsinki, 1998, at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary
Art in Helsinki, Finland. Further information about Nick Crowe's work
is available at www.nickcrowe.net.
Gary Hill
Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) , 2000
Since his first experiments with video in the mid-1970s, Gary Hill
has used the time-based, feedback properties of the medium to explore
the nature of perception. The artist's inquiry takes place through
an ongoing examination of the relationship between language and image,
within which the body occupies a central role as both subject matter
and, more generally, as presence. This presence exists at many different
levels: as image, sound or text and in the viewer's physical immediacy.
Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) embodies these qualities in a very intense
and physical fashion, engaging the viewer in a somewhat disorienting
and confrontational manner. Associations arising from the experience
of Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) are vast and highly personal, yet
they seem to evoke a sense of anguish, displacement and flight from
memory. A clip from this work is available at http://www.donaldyoung.com/garyh.htm.
IMAGE:
Gary Hill
Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson),
2000
Slide-channel video/sound installation
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