Contact: Local to Global
November 25, 2017 – April 28, 2018
Contact: Local to Global, like the other centennial exhibitions, highlights the engagement of artists with New Mexico, the Museum of Art with artists and collectors, and New Mexico’s engagement with the national and international arts community. Additionally the exhibition looks beyond those very literal intersections and implicates larger ideas about contact such as our engagement with the land and environment, our communities’ alignment with one another, and more broadly the implications of contact such as the discovery of the New World, and space exploration.
Contact: Local to Global has two interrelated components – the first of which will focus on works by artists like Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, Frederick Hammersley and Susan York who have lived and worked in the region, as well as artists and artworks with differing connections to New Mexico.
A second component of more contemporary artworks directly address issues of land, location and environment and will include the site specific installationPollination by indigenous collaborative Postcommodity, single channel videos The Placeless Place by Berlin and New York based artists Ati Maier, and Yorgo Alexopoulos’s work Everything In-Between. Alexopoulos’ work, a 4K animation with custom electronics, was shot and commissioned in New Mexico underscoring the continued relevance of the centuries-old tradition of artists making work that is a meditation on the New Mexico landscape.
Jackson, WY - Center for the Arts is pleased to announce the inaugural Creatives in Residence project, Observatories, curated by Matthew Day Jackson, Camille Obering and Andy Kincaid.
On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will occur in Jackson, WY. The shadow of the eclipse is a point of departure for this program, a point from which we take into account the idea of the silhouette. Jackson Hole and the forms that constitute this place as the "Last of the Old West" maintain a sort of monolithic presence, becoming a silhouette, or shroud, in such a way that its other narratives and meanings become obfuscated. Images and forms that identify Jackson - bronze buffaloes, images of cowboys on bucking broncos, paintings of geysers, wooden sidewalks, to name a few - divert one's understanding of the history of the place away from the other histories that defined and continue to define Jackson Hole and the American West.
Observatories will include work by the following artists
Arturo Bandini
Sarah Braman
Glenn Kaino
Liz Magic Laser
James Luna
Ati Maier
Paul McCarthy
Shana Moulton
Eduardo Navarro
Anna Tsouhlarakis
Observatories' artists will be installing their work one by one. Glenn Kaino's "Hollow Earth" is now open to the public
from 9AM-9PM in The Center Park. The summer-long residency will feature several free, public events including an artist talk with Anna Tsouhlarakis
on July 10 from 6-7PM, an opening reception with the artists on August 22 from 5-7PM, and a performance piece by Ati Maier on August 24 at 7PM.
More information about Observatories is available at jhcenterforthearts.org/observatories.
“It’s like the development of civilization on the back of a horse,” Matthew Jackson said of the performance. “How the continuation of this form, a horse as a vehicle and how she’s making the tracing of an event that’s the furthest we’ve ever been from Earth. It’s a really nice continuation of that evolvement of civilization.”
Experience Ati Maier's 'Space Rider' performance on Thursday, August 24th at 7PM at the Teton County Fairgrounds. Free & open to the Public.
Hours: 11am - 6pm, Wednesday - Sunday PIEROGI155 Suffolk St. Brooklyn, NY 11211
PRESS RELEASE | Ati MIAER The Placeless Place
Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of new works on paper and two new videos by Ati Maier. The exhibition at Pierogi takes its title from the video, “The Placeless Place,” which will be screened at our satellite exhibition space, The Boiler, on November 17thwith a live performance by Vostok. The videos will also be on view at Pierogi throughout the exhibition.
Ati Maier has never been simply a painter. For her, images are always maps that can give rise to a landscape, bloom into a globe, or enclose an entire universe. And while the intention of her terrains remains visually fixed, vis-à-vis the viewer it will continue on its transformative journey.
In the late1990s, Maier produced a series of sculptures that provoked this altered viewpoint. Layered on top of low pedestals were maps and sculptures covered by milky Plexi glass, leaving only traces of the miniatures visible beneath. The obscured artificial landscapes would only reveal themselves to the viewer who looked below the sculptures’ milky surface, discovering the artificial landscape stretched before them.
Maier intensified this altered field in her paintings. The images became more complex: entire galaxies appeared side by side, and overlapped or collided in their animations. Multiple coexistence of the various worlds, or parts of these worlds, occurred. In doing so, Maier achieved a complexity in her images, which brings to mind Pollock’s “Mural” where, even after days of observation, they are not completely accessible. In contrast to the expansive paintings of Julie Mehretu – with whom Maier’s work was exhibited at The Whitney Museum in 2005 – Maier juxtaposes a compression, a co-existence, and simultaneity.
The “space rider” appeared in her works in 2003 to deal with this simultaneity in a non-abstract manner. This singular figure has since become a permanent component of Maier’s work. The alter-ego of an artist, who wishes to travel between worlds in her private, as well as in her artistic life. At first the figure of the space rider easily escaped one’s notice in her drawings, but it has since travelled along concentric circles to a central position in Maier’s work.
In the video “The Placeless Place” (2016) the figure rides silently through a deserted urban landscape, eventually arriving at Times Square in New York City. Surrounded by dense crowds of people and the flickering universe of images and video screens, the seemingly endless looping movement of the space rider comes to a halt – issuing in a moment of contemplation and assurance. Exactly at this moment, Maier inserts a scene from the first space rider video (“The Map Is Not the Territory,” 2013) on one of the digital monitors. What could be misunderstood as a cinematic self-reference is, in fact, one of the simultaneities that Maier repeatedly creates in her drawings: a loophole through which the figure of the space rider returns to a deserted, pre-civilized environment.
Though her own oeuvre may be as incalculable as the American story, Maier is successful in giving “The Placeless Place” a political and contemporary significance and reality. The constantly moving being of the space rider fits magically into the urban environment through visual and architectural references. Only the encounter with the crowds in Times Square evokes a disconcerting feeling and illustrates the isolation of the figure in this new environment. The foreign is never a natural state, but rather something purely referential. The feeling of alienation disappears with the return to the extraterrestrial environment of the first space rider video and the absence of people from the scene.
Ati Maier has never been a painter of one-dimensional images and easy answers. She is an artist who recognizes and demonstrates the complexity of the world we live in. Through compressed, superimposed, parallel worlds, and inextricable structures in her paintings, sculptures, installations, and films, Maier puts her finger on the pulse of society.
(Adapted from a translation of “Thoughts about Ati Maier’s work, 2016” by German artist, Tilo Schulz.)
Ati Maier currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY, NY), the Museum der bildenden Kuenste Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany), among others, and has been included in exhibitions at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany), the Whitney Museum (NY, NY), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum (Ithaca, NY), and BCA, Burlington, VT, among others. Her 3D video animations were included in the Fokus Bienial in Lódz, Poland (2013) and in “Currents” at the Hardwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM (2016).
“The Placeless Place,” 2016, Full HD, Format 1080p, 10 Minutes Directed and performed by Ati Maier Production: Klaus Knoesel, FKK Film Camera: Timo Seidel Editor / Post Production: Patrick Saleh-Zaki Composer: Vostok
“The Placeless Place” was filmed in various locations in New York City: Times Square; East River Park, beneath the Williamsburg Bridge; and Corona Park, Queens, home of the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
“Milkomeda” 2016, 3D animated video, Full HD, 3:40 minutes Directed and drawn by Ati Maier Animation and Sound: Remi Pawlowski “Milkomeda” depicts the collision of the Milkyway and the Andromeda galaxies and the rebirth of a new galaxy, Milkomeda, which will occur in approximately four billion years.
