Freight + Volume is pleased to present videos by Brooklyn-based artists Elizabeth and Andrew Neel. “Event”, opening on January 7 and running through February 2, features a series of pieces in an ongoing collaboration. The Events are elusive to the viewer, in that both cause and effect are de-contextualized from an implied narrative. In this way, the artists offer a rare opportunity to confront our habitual assumptions with which meaning is created. Both perspectives – that of witness and writer - encourage a heightened awareness of how frequently narrative seduces its audience into consuming information without question by drawing it into a seamless text.
Like lost pieces from a puzzle, these events have been unhinged from their coded texts. A car crash and a summer nap do not typically carry equal narrative weight. Stripped of any pre-existing hierarchy, like objects in a collection, the series questions the assignment of scope and significance to certain moments in time over others.
These videos consciously engage with representational traditions as varied as painting, documentary film and photography. In what recalls theatrical reenactments commonly used in contemporary documentaries, an actor urinates in a cup, recreating what may have been the only moment missed by the flash bulbs of tabloid photographers. Inspired by an arbitrary notice on the internet and re-conceived in an invented location, a car crash is absorbed into a sublime Hudson River landscape. The series as a whole echoes the filmic process of montage wherein juxtapositions are presented in all of their harmony and dissonance.
Andrew Neel’s films have appeared at the Newport Beach Film Festival, the Los Angeles Short Film Festival and have aired on Showtime. He won the Best Experimental Drama award at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival in 2002. His first feature-length film, Darkon, will premier in competition at South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2006. He holds a BA from Columbia University and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Elizabeth Neel’s paintings and videos have been shown nationally and internationally in the last year. She holds a BA from Brown University and a Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She had her first solo show of paintings at Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert, Inc. in May and will be included in the Triumph of Painting VI at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2007. She is currently working toward her MFA at Columbia University.
In the project space: Recent drawings and paintings by James Stanley, whose work mediates the divide between developed and undeveloped societies. The artist sets out to explore the artifacts of a possible future and a curious brotherhood taking shape at the ends of the earth. James Stanley holds an MFA from Columbia University.
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