Gail Wight with Retort at Mills Art Museum

To: Retort
Via: MT
 
> We Interrupt Your Program
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> Maria Antelman, Maja Bajevic, Maria Friberg, Nina Katchadourian, Marisa Olson, Julia Page,
> Shannon Plumb, Jean Shin, Renetta Sitoy, Julianne Swartz, Stephanie Syjuco,
> Claudia X. Valdes, Anne Walsh, and Gail Wight with RETORT
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> Organized by Marcia Tanner, guest curator
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> January 16 - March 16, 2008
> Reception: Wednesday, January 23, 5:30-7:30 pm

> Oakland, CA—Continuing its commitment to the work of women artists and curators, The Mills College Art Museum presents We Interrupt Your Program: a group exhibition of video and new media works by fourteen emerging and mid-career female artists organized by guest curator Marcia Tanner. The exhibition will be on view from January 16 through March 16, 2008. A reception for the artists will be held on Wednesday, January 23 from 5:30 to 7:30, followed by a conversation between the curator and participating artists Jean Shin and Claudia X. Valdes in Danforth Lecture Hall adjacent to the Museum. The reception and the talk are free and open to the public.
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> The works in We Interrupt Your Program intervene in, reconfigure, augment, and/or re-contextualize dominant narratives of war, power, science, technology, and gender from what are arguably distinctively female and feminist perspectives. Spanning a range of media and aesthetic strategies, the exhibition includes computer-manipulated video, digital animation, video installation, interactive sculpture, and photography.
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> All of the artists in We Interrupt . . . respond to contemporary mainstream media—including network television, mass market feature films, instructional science videos, and online communication platforms such as email and chat rooms—interrogating them as restrictive vocabularies and structures that routinely exclude the female voice and point of view. Their work, which often formally refers to art historical precedents like minimalism or landscape painting, as well as popular visual culture, is powerfully expressive, conceptually complex, and relevant to our cultural moment. 
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> Marcia Tanner is a Bay Area independent curator and writer interested in artists working at the intersection of science and new media. Her most recent project was Brides of Frankenstein, an exhibition of work by women artists who use contemporary technologies to animate synthetic creatures, presented at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2005. She is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and catalogue essays. Her writings on art have appeared in Art+Text, ARTnews, Artweek, CABINET, LIMN Magazine, and stretcher.org, among others.
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> The Mills College Art Museum, founded in 1925, is a dynamic center for art that focuses on the creative work of women as artists and curators. The Museum strives to engage and inspire the diverse and distinctive cultures of the Bay Area by presenting innovative exhibitions by emerging and established national and international artists. Exhibitions are designed to challenge and invite reflection upon the profound complexities of contemporary culture.
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> A few examples of the work included in this exhibition:
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> Marisa Olson’s performance projects ingeniously exploit and question contemporary technoculture and the communication capabilities of Web 2.0, particularly among the ‘teen and twenty-something generations. Her Golden Oldies (2006-07) documents and adapts for museum exhibition one of her live performances. In this hilarious yet reflective piece, the deadpan Olson earnestly attempts to extract music from a vinyl LP record disk and an audio-tape by unsuccessfully kludging them with a boom box and a child’s 45 RPM record turntable. While alluding to classic TV sitcoms such as I Love Lucy as well as TV DIY celebrities like Martha Stewart, Golden Oldies inevitably recalls Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
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> New York-based artist Jean Shin is known for her labor-intensive recycling process, in which she transforms exhaustive accumulations of cast-off mundane objects and materials—shoes, umbrellas, prescription drug containers, lottery tickets—into visually alluring, conceptually rich sculptures and sculptural installations. TEXTile, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM), Philadelphia while Shin was a resident artist there, incorporates computer keycaps into works that simultaneously celebrate and question the technology of email as a mode of human communication. TEXTile, a complex interactive sculpture, embeds over 20,000 computer keycaps, spelling out email correspondence Shin conducted with the staff at FWM, into a high-performance laminate fabric with Spectra fibers.
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> Chilean-born artist Claudia X. Valdes lives and works in New Mexico near Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb. Since 2001, her work has focused on the ways in which the mass media has presented nuclear armament and nuclear war since the Cold War period. Her digital video In the Dream of the Planet (2002) appropriates in its entirety the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After, a fictionalized drama about the aftermath of an all-out nuclear attack on the United States. Valdes condenses the film down to 56 seconds and repeats it six times. With each repetition, she edits the film to convey themes that reflect her research into the military, scientific, medical, media, and ordinary human responses to the nuclear threat.
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> Gail Wight’s multimedia work reflects her love/hate relationship with science: its history, theories and practice. Her art probes the oversimplification and loss of perspective that can limit the scientific gaze. In Meaning of Minuscule (2006)—an interactive Plexiglas sculpture of an enormously enlarged microscope—viewers scroll through images magnified at different scales, displayed on the microscope’s stage, that reconstruct the history of technologies of magnification. Wight’s video for Afflicted Powers, an installation produced by the Berkeley-based collective RETORT for the 2007 Seville Biennial, combines archival video images of anti-war protests and air combat with a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica. ##
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> Museum Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 11-4pm; Wednesday 11-7:30 pm; Monday closed. Admission is free.
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> Mills College Art Museum, 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, CA 94613 www.mills.edu/museum
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> Image: Shannon Plumb, Olympics, 2005, Single-channel DVD, Courtesy of the artist and Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York