A Shot In The Dark:

Three Curators;Three Installations; Three Weekends in February Find out what three curators and artists will do with one weekend, an empty space, and full curatorial freedom.

February 14 Michael Oliveri

February 21 Susan Bridges

This Friday, The Contemporary presents the second installation in a series of weekend installation, A Shot in the Dark. 'The Hovering' is a mixed media installation by Benita Carr, Evan Levy and Susan Bridges which explores the suspension and anxiety of these times. Materials such as textiles, metal, wood, animal skins, and video projection will be used in the piece. The artists had this to say about their project, "We are collectively waiting for the other shoe to drop and wondering if the powers that be are aiming at their feet."

February 28 Alex Kvares

The Final Installment of Shot in the Dark:

An exhibition of gratuitous single channel pathos by former delinquents of discourse, presently older and more contemplative towards their previous wayward practices. They have abandoned their toy weapons and ambitions, given up on anarchy, devil worshipping and illicit drugs, all in exchange for the trance-inducing flicker of light on the screen.

The following people have put aside their accordians, remote controls and whiskey bottles, and picked up their camera in order to project their frustrations onto you, the viewer:

J.Butcher C.Dongoski M.Hosford Z.Khalemsky M.Krueger A. Liftig P.Logobardi H.Mcgraw G.Ornay J.Peragine

Interactive, performative and sound generating actions are carried out by a collective of Georgia State University students under the direction of C.Dongoski and R.Thompson.

All materials were hastily selected by Alexander Kvares.

2003 Atlanta Biennial

March 22 - June 7, 2003

Opening reception will be held on March 21, 7-9pm

‘I come to Atlanta with some preconceptions to ignore... I want to celebrate the city through its dynamic artists’ - curator Franklin Sirmans

Alejandro Aguilera, Calvert Brown, Jason Cochrane, Emily Diehl, Debra Fritts, Michael Gibson, Donte Hayes, Hope Hilton, Loretta Mae Hirsch, Sara Hornbacher, Scott Ingram, Alexander Kvares, Lance Lamont, Donald Locke, Eric Mack, James Hiram Malone, Traci Molloy, Prema Murthy, Lourdes Perdomo, Julie Püttgen, Kathryn Refi, John Roberts, Omar Thompson, Larry Walker, Rusty Wallace.

More than 500 artists, working within 100 miles of Atlanta, responded to our Call for Submissions for the 2003 Atlanta Biennial. Curator, Franklin Sirmans, visited studios over the course of four days and refined his search to twenty-five artists. Among his selections are several recent graduates and students, as well as prominent figures that have had a profound effect on the Atlanta artistic community through their work as artists and teachers. Sirmans also identified a few 'hot' artists who have been working below contemporary art's usual radar, as well as outstanding figures that are simply new to Atlanta and thus have not yet established a local presence.

The 2003 Atlanta Biennial reflects the varied formats and materials of the work submitted. We received few submissions from the field of video and the show includes just one video artist. The lack of video and new media encouraged Sirmans to develop a particular emphasis on painting and sculpture, what he calls 'the basis of art practice'. The work in the Biennial invites viewers to invest time in the process of looking. It also reflects an element of time, of craft and attention to material, in the artistic process itself.

Franklin Sirmans, is a New York-based critic and curator. Sirmans co-curated One Planet Under a Groove at the Bronx Museum, 2001, Americas Remixed for the Comune di Milano, Milan and Mass Appeal at Galerie 101, Ottawa, and throughout eastern Canada in 2002, and New Wave at Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York, 2003. A former editor of Flash Art Magazine, Sirmans has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, Essence Magazine, and Art in America.

June 14-August 9, 2003

Summer Solos: Jim Barsness, David Eisenhour, and Jeff Sonhouse

James Barsness: Paintings

James Barsness’s large, scroll-like paintings evoke hybrid worlds in which fantasy, reality, and mythology collide. Characters inspired by folk and fairy tales rub shoulders with those drawn from girly magazines and comic books. We are just as likely to recognize ball point pen as we are gold leaf. Frequently painted from a bird’s eye perspective, reminiscent of mediaeval maps, these scenes teem with half-told stories and point to the drives and desires the polite society represses. Like Barsness’s characters figures who attempt to navigate their maze-like environments, the viewer is absorbed in process of unraveling these works.

David Isenhour: Resplendent Probe

Immersed in the iconography of cartoons, science fiction, genetic engineering, and religion, David Isenhour mutates these sources into objects that feel at once man made, organic, and post-human. There is something polymorphously perverse, bordering on the ecstatic, about his works. In Resplendent Probe Isenhour delves into his religious past and spiritual present, exploring where they intersect with popular culture. Evoking luminescence and wetness, as though pulled from a vat brimming with the ooze of the subconscious, the homogeneity of the works’ reflective surfaces provokes self-inspection on behalf of the viewer.

Jeff Sonhouse: Probable Cause

Jeff Sonhouse explores the collision of appearance and disguise in these new paintings. Working with and against the idea of the mask, which simultaneously projects a public image and cloaks the face beneath, Sonhouse incorporates a dizzying assortment of signifiers of identity and style. Sonhouse collages his canvases with materials ranging from glitter and beads to matches (which he then sometimes lights in situ). Playful, ornamental, and disturbing, these portraits suggest that the performance of self is as much about survival and camouflage as it is the thrill of self-adornment.

East Gallery

Secrets and Lies: Work from Yun Bai and Ohm Phanphiroj

Sensual Exotic Femme vs. Sick Public Slut, 2002 Oil and Clipping from Pornographic magazines on masonite, 2'x2'

Viewed from afar, Yun Bai's collages appear to depict luscious hybrid flowers-orchids perhaps-against the black laquered background familiar to traditional Chinese art. On drawing closer, the viewer discovers that these petals and buds have been from photographs of body parts taken from pornographic magazines. Alongside these collages, Yun Bai adds quotations from the same publications that convey contradictory fantasies of the Asain woman as flower/whore. These alternately alluring and repellent works capture and convey sexual fantasies that are so easily projected onto the 'exotic' female other.

The First Conversation Between Frank and I,2002, video still

This short but intense video plays off the recent phenomenon of reality TV, calling the practice into question while at the same time reveling in the morally ambiguous nature of the genre. Ohm captures the push-pull-push again erotic interplay between two men. One – the subject of the film – is visible, caught and filmed off guard. The other – the cameraman/artist – remains hidden. Although we do not see the artist, we hear him, as he alternately cajoles, seduces, and taunts the increasingly reluctant subject of his film. In a reversal of familiar sexual politics, in which Western men ‘send for’ Asian brides, the now predatory Asian man has, it seems, ‘sent for’ his all-American male mate. The raw, roughly edited footage is intended to provoke visceral reactions in the viewer and open up questions about sex as commodity and the often unsavory politics of desire. Also on view, photographs from Seeing American:Seeing Landscape which record scenes of roadside America from an outsider's perspective.

MAIN GALLERY

NEW WAVES:
Selections from the Centre Georges Pompidou's New Media Collection
SEPTEMBER 6-OCTOBER 25, 2003

Jean-Luc Godard
Chris Marker
Claude Closky
Pierre Huyghe
Matthieu Laurette
Majida Khattari

This survey of groundbreaking video and new media work, selected by the Center Georges Pompidou’s New Media Curator, Christine van Assche, showcases film/video pioneers, Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker, in tandem with a younger generation of artists in France working with film and new media that includes Claude Closky, Pierre Huyghe, Matthieu Laurette, and Majida Khattari. The exhibition features work in video, DVD, and CD-Rom, as well as artists’ books.

Since 1976, Paris’s Center Pompidou has stood out amongst European museums for its forward-thinking policies of acquiring and exhibiting artists’ video tapes, video installations, CD Rom’s and CD’s. This longstanding interest in the discipline led to the creation, in 1991, of a New Media collection with the Musée national d'art moderne of the Center which includes 65 installations and 1.000 video and sound tapes, CD Roms and websites.

The exhibition features work in video, DVD, CD-ROM and artists ’ books.

ADJUNCT PROGRAMMING

LEGACIES: Introductions to the work and impact of two of France ’s most complex and influential film makers,Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker.

VIRGINIA BONNER on CHRIS MARKER
Wednesday,September 24 @ 7 PM
Free to members and with Gallery Admission of $5.00, $3.00 for students and seniors

Virginia Bonner offers an introduction to the innovative, highly poetic editing techniques and expressive use of intertextuality in the work of Chris Marker. Illustrated with video clips from such key works as Sans soleil (1982), Level 5 (1995), Le joli mai (1962) and La Jetée (1962), Bonner explores how Marker ’s distinctive style helped to redefine the documentary genre and create a new language for filmmaking in general. This introduction serves as a valuable complement to Marker ’s exploration of hypertext in the CD-ROM Immemory, presented as part of the current exhibition, New Waves.

VIRGINIA BONNER is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Clayton College & State University. Her research focuses on intersections among avant-garde, feminist,and documentary cinemas,and particularly investigates these modes of filmmaking as they converge in the work of Left Bank filmmakers Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda.

RICHARD NEUPERT , “Jean-Luc Godard: 50 Years of Renewing the Cinema”
Wednesday,October 8 @ 7 PM

Free to members and with Gallery Admission of $5.00, $3.00 for students and seniors

Jean-Luc Godard published his first review in 1951, shot his first
documentary in 1954, and his first feature, Breathless, in 1960. Since
those first bold steps in forging the French New Wave, Godard has continued to rethink and renew the cinema. His projects, whether feature films or video works, confront art, sexual politics, and contemporary culture.

This presentation outlines several recurring motifs and strategies from Godard’s amazing career. Unlike his New Wave colleagues, Godard never stuck with any single approach to the cinema and never settled into the industry. He is a collage filmmaker, often mixing documentary, history, and fiction into new syntheses never before seen. Moreover, Godard remains one of the world’s most important visual artists, as can be seen from this overview of his most stunning work.

Neupert will be showing short clips from such movies as
À bout de souffle (Breathless), Une Femme est une Femme (A Woman is A Woman) , Le Mépris (Contempt), Pierrot Le Fou, Passion and the autobiographical JLG by JLG

RICHARD NEUPERT is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Georgia. His most recent books include A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2002), and the translation of Michel Marie’s The French New Wave: An Artistic School (2002).

Situations Françaises is made possible by generous grants from the Department of Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Étant Donnés: The French American Fund for Contemporary Art, and is sponsored by Delta Air Lines.

NEW WAVES, NEW MEDIA, NEW APPROACHES TO THE ARCHIVE AND MUSEUM

HELENA RECKITT
Director of Education and Exhibitions, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center

The archival impulse propels much of the work in this exhibition. For some artists this takes the form of the insatiable desire for knowledge and information associated with the work of the collector or lexicographer. For others the project takes a more ironic turn, where the absurdity at the core of all systems of organization becomes evident.

The desire to gather and catalogue emerges strongly in projects here by Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. New Waves is organized along generational lines, with Godard and Marker presented as the pioneers who overhauled and reimagined cinematic conventions in their work of the 1960’s and who continue to break new ground, albeit to less public fanfare these days. Works in the exhibition by both artists have a self-reflexive and retrospective quality to them. There’s a sense of reviewing a lifetime of images and attempting to put them in order, a form of scrapbook making or memoir. Although both figures have the status of founding fathers of the avant-garde, here they present themselves in the guise as eternal students, collectors, and spectators, reflecting upon and paying homage to the images, sounds, and sights that have made them – and by extension us – who they are.

Jean-Luc Godard was, of course, one of the central figures of the influential Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) in the 1960’s. Together with filmmakers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Resnais, Godard revolutionized film making through his stark aesthetic juxtapositions of image and sound together and switches between political and personal, poetic and philosophical themes. Pursuing the theory that anyone can make a movie, Godard epitomized what film critic Jonathan Romney calls “an ideal of a demanding, militant, hyper-serious yet hyper-playful” film maker, at once solipsistic and self-reflexive while also lyrical and punning.

Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Toutes les histoires) and Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Une histoire seule), 1989, are the first in Godard’s six-part history of cinema. Taking the form of an extended visual essay, with no narrative drive, they show Godard in his library, puffing like a Hollywood producer on a cigar, making pronouncements that are by turns profound, poetic, and polemical. Between clips from early and classic cinema footage we see and hear the typewriter and the edit machine, evoking Godard’s combined careers as critic and filmmaker.
Technically sophisticated, Histoire(s) du Cinéma incorporates double and triple exposures, freeze frames, jump cuts, stark juxtapositions, experiments and distortions in sound. Histoire(s) du Cinéma is a reverie on art, film, society and, above all, cinema. It touches on themes of war, sex, the relationship between images and memory, and where – and to whom – the history of cinema belongs.

Chris Marker shares with Godard a utopian urge to accumulate, acknowledge, and organize visual and aural inspirations. His CD-Rom Immemory, which critic Raymond Bellour describes as “‘stalking both the book and the film” pays tribute to Proust and his concept of the madeleine – the small, shell-shaped cake that the writer dipped into his tea each afternoon – as a trigger for memory. Like Godard, Marker’s meditation on the twentieth century raises questions about the collective consciousness and how subjectivity is formed in our encounter with images. The CD-Rom is organized around spatial metaphors. The viewer is invited to make his or her own selections and is led through “zones” of travel, war, cinema, poetry, fiction, and philosophy. Just as Marker’s poetic film, La Jetée, was made up almost entirely of photographic stills (with voiceover) so Immemory offers an imaginary gallery of images glimpsed and recalled. Travel and family pictures lead into literary and philosophical quotations. The work has a rhythmic, musical quality, and indeed sound and music feature strongly. Although Marker’s vision of interactivity is perhaps rather too idealistic for the inevitable limitations of the technology at his disposal, his impulse towards inclusiveness and expansion – what Deleuze characterized as “arboresence” – emerges clearly in this generous and thought provoking project.

Pierre Huyghe is one of the best-known of the younger generation of artists working in France today. He became known, in part, for his collaborations with other prominent Paris-based artists, Philippe Parenno and Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, who together trademarked the Manga character, Ann Lee, and made a series of animations based around her. In 2002 Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize for his installation, The Third Memory. Of the younger figures featured in New Waves Huyghe is the one with the strongest formal and philosophical links to Godard and co, as well as a strong sense of social activism.

Huyghe’s first projects involved billboards and posters that documented changes to the urban environment in Paris. In the 1990’s he helped to organize mobile local TV network that ran self-produced pirate programs. His work has explored themes of interpretation and agency in cinematic representation, following the avant-garde precept that “one has to know how to stop images, to fix them, in order to question them and keep them from being swept away by the wave of the discourse of the media” (Jean-Francois Chevrier and Catherine David, Passages de l’image, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Centre Cultural de la Fundació Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona, 1991, p.44).

In the video projection, L’ellipse (Jump Cut), 1998, each of three screens played a scene from or related to Wim Wenders’ The American Friend. In the first, the character played by Bruno Ganz speaks on the phone, setting up an appointment. In the next, we see the older, contemporary Ganz picking up where the scene left off, en route to a meeting in Paris. The third screen returns to the original movie. In The Third Memory, 2000, Huyghe retells the story of the bank robbery that provided the plot for the movie, Dog Day Afternoon, through the words and direction of the original protagonist, John Wojtowicz. Huyghe restages the events of the robbery – which was, apparently, planned in order to raise funds for Wojtowicz’s male lover’s sex change operation – in a set that duplicates the original bank. He presents the new footage along with clips from both the movie and news reports of the time. Provoking questions about the gap between reality and fiction, Dog Day Afternoon gives Wojtowicz a chance to retell and recuperate his own version of a sensationalized event.

Dubbing, 1996 – 7, depicts fifteen voiceover actors congregated like an orchestra, interpreting the soundtrack for the movie, Poltergeist (no coincidence, perhaps, that Spielberg is Godard’s self-declared cinematic nemesis?). Huyghe has always been interested in questions of time – the time of making a work of art, the time of viewing it, and what happens to and between viewers as they watch. In an interview for New Art Examiner, July/August, 2000, with Jan Estep, he spoke of his hope not for ”consumable time but something that is more reflexive time.” Dubbing prizes open the mechanics of movie making. Employing a Brechtian – or Godardian - distancing, Dubbing frustrates audience expectations to “see” the movie. At the same time it reveals an aspect of film production that is usually hidden, and an intimacy between voiceover actors who normally work alone but who have been brought together for this collective exercise in translation.

In contrast to the expansive meditations of the older generation of Godard and Marker, Claude Closky’s attitude is of radical tautology, bereft of grand illusions or expectations. In websites, videos, projections, and artists’ books, Closky considers the random nature of systems of classification – alphabetical, chronological, numerical. Closky’s Mes vingts minutes préférées (My 20 favorite minutes), of 1993, literally presents a series of ‘favorite’ minutes provoking a kind of involuntary chuckle in the viewer who is forced to watch (pun intended?) time pass. The artists’ book, 100 Photographs which are not photographs of horses – they are, in fact, of hens – brings to mind Magritte’s tautological Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Throwing sand in the face of grown-up systems of organization, the piece charms and irritates in equal measure. In a recent internet project for the Dia Museum of Art, Do You Want Love or Lust?, Closky presented a seemingly endless list of binary questions. As Lynne Cooke notes, Closky “savors the pleasures of flirtation, the titillations of desire and libidinal excess without finally succumbing, without being wholly seduced.”

Matthieu Laurette is another artist who is interested in systems and their internal logic and rules. His form of social critique takes the guise of an immersion in a particular corporate, consumer, or institutional culture. By entering into a system and following its rules to the point of absurdity, Laurette turns social conventions inside out. In the early nineties he launched an online ‘Citizenship Project’ in an attempt to gain citizenship in as many countries as possible. Borrowing the hyperbolic performance styles of DADA, Fluxus, Situationism, and Happenings, Laurette’s work has a campy edge that verges on hysteria. In the piece presented here, Apparition, Je passe à la télé (I am on TV), of 1996, Laurette appears on a French daytime talk show to discuss his three-year project during which he lived off and washed with entirely free ‘refundable if unsatisfactory’ products. His televisual debut, it is the result of Laurette’s exhaustive campaign to be invited to appear on TV. Posing a link between pointless shopping and the value (or lack of value) placed on the artist and the artist’s work, the piece suggests how identity is constructed via our encounters with consumer products.

Also riffing on the idea of the collection, in this case the fashion collection, is Majida Khattari’s Défilé / Performance, (Fashion Show / Performance) performed at L’Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in 1998. Ordinary women perform a runway show in outfits that parody and exaggerate Muslim restrictions on female dress and behavior. A Moroccan who has lived in Paris for fifteen years, Khattari is a Muslim who is alarmed by the repressive excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. She designed these outfits after public discussion about veiling in France came to a head when the parents of Muslim girls insisted that they wear the veil to school. The exaggerated chadors and robes of Khattari’s models show a debt to the Surrealistic fabrications of Meret Oppenheim and the fantastical performances of early Rebecca Horn. Women push against these constricting outfits with varied degrees of success. At times the garments become womb or cocoon-like, suggesting that they are places from which women will emerge into new-found liberation. At others, the attempt to resist the clothes’ constraints proves too much, and imagery of self-mutilation emerges. A gown fashioned from the tricoleur wittily suggests that French cultural identity has been changed as a result of its growing Muslim population.

Whereas woman as the desired, glimpsed, never-to-be-possessed fantasy figure is prevalent in the work of Godard and Marker, here Khattari turns a critical eye on the fetishisation of the female body. Khattari suggests that this hysterical male response to female sexuality expresses a sadistic and fetishistic drive. As fetishism depends on male fear of castration, the desire to constrain women is not only a futile attempt to keep them down, but an unconscious admission of male fears of impotence.

The Pompidou Center is one of the most influential cultural institutions in the world. The Museum is visited by huge numbers of people (although how many go inside the museum, and how many come to play on Rogers and Piano’s funky external elevators and escalators is a moot point). Beyond this, the Pompidou is remarkable for its interdisciplinary policies of programming and collecting contemporary art. The New Media Collection contains hundreds of artists’ films, tapes, DVD’s, CD-Roms, and installations. It is fitting that an exhibition such as New Waves, which examines the impulse to collect and organize the products of high art as well as vernacular culture, emerged from the Pompidou, itself a living archive and inspiration for museums, collections, and art centers internationally.
The Pompidou Center

The Center Pompidou, National Center of Art and Culture, was established in 1977 by the former French President, Georges Pompidou, who served in office from 1969 to 1974. Pompidou’s vision was for a public center for the arts that would focus on all forms of modern and contemporary creativity in such fields as sculpture, painting, literature, cinema, and music. Located in the heart of Paris, in a pioneering building designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, the Center Pompidou receives approximately six million visitors a year. One of the most important cultural institutions in the world, the Center Pompidou was the first museum in Europe to focus entirely on modern and contemporary art. It also comprises a public reference library and archive on twentieth century art, a cinema and screening rooms, a center for music and acoustic research, spaces for education programs, bookshops and several cafés.

An interdisciplinary institution, the Center Pompidou organizes and presents approximately thirty exhibitions a year in addition to numerous performances, film screenings, symposia, and concerts with international artists and intellectuals. These programs travel throughout France and the rest of the world.

Since 1977, the Center Pompidou has presented video and multimedia installations. This commitment to the field led in 1991 to the creation of a New Media Collection, a selection of which is presented as part of the Contemporary’s exhibition, New Waves. The Center Pompidou’s Curator of New Media, Christine van Assche, has chosen to present film/video pioneers, Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker, in tandem with a younger artists from a younger generation working in France: Claude Closky, Pierre Huyghe, Matthieu Laurette and Majida Khattari.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
New Waves is part of Situations Françaises: Atlanta Presents Contemporary Art From France, a city-wide series of exhibitions mounted by three venues, that was launched earlier in 2003 at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery and Georgia State University School of Art and Design Galleries.

Situations Françaises is made possible by generous grants from the department of Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Étant Donnés: The French American Fund for Contemporary Art, and is sponsored by Delta Air Lines.
The Contemporary would like to thank the curatorial staff at the Center Georges Pompidou and Cécile Peyronnet and Nathalie Bonnin t the French Consul in Atlanta for their extraordinarily hard work on behalf of the exhibition.

We are also indebted to our fabulous Gallery Interns Drew Conrad, Bernadette Donegan, Kelly Naher, and Stephanie Marshall for their hard work and good humor. Thanks are also due to Jeff Conefrey for exhibition installation and to Robert Natowitz for technical onsultation.

Situations Françaises is made possible by generous grants from the department of Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Étant Donnés: The French American Fund for Contemporary Art, and is sponsored by Delta Air Lines. We are grateful to the Alliance Francaise for sponsoring the Patrons Reception.

EAST GALLERY

EXHIBITIONS from GEORGIA TECH’s
GRADUATE SCHOOL of ARCHITECTURE

SHoP (GREGG PASQUARELLI)
September 6 -October 5,2003
Exhibition opening Friday, September 5, 7-9 pm

SHoP | Sharples Holden Pasquarelli is an emerging design firm with five partners whose education and experience encompass architecture, fine arts, structural engineering, finance, and business management. Founded in 1996, SHoP was awarded the 2001 Emerging Voices Award by the Architectural League of New York and the 2001 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Progressive Architecture [P/A Award] Citation in 1999. In 2000, SHoP was the winner of the annual Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center Young Architect's Awards Program. Most recently, SHoP was one of three finalists for the 2002 Architecture Design Award of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards Program. In addition to being widely published and exhibited, work produced by SHoP is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. SHoP's broad range of work includes a university academic building, a pedestrian bridge, a civic park, public art installations, a museum, retail shops, and mixed used housing, [most of which have been built or under construction.] The work of SHoP searches for a vertical integration of the design process using technology to gain access to new territories of extraction through execution rather than through a technophilic obsession with digital form. Between the five partners they have taught or hold teaching positions at Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, Yale University, and City University of New York. Bill Sharples, Chris Sharples, Coren Sharples, Kimberly Holden and Gregg Pasquarelli all received their Master of Architecture from Columbia University. Gregg Pasquarelli from SHoP will be giving a lecture on their work at the Georgia Tech College of

Architecture auditorium Wednesday September 10 at 5:30 pm. For more information on SHoP visit www.shoparc.com. For more information on the Georgia Tech architecture program lecture series visit www.coa.gatech.edu/arch/.

Opening November 14th. Show runs from November 15th – January 3rd 2004
Free to Members/ $5.00 Non-Members/ $3.00 Seniors & Student Non-Members
Terrain Vague web gallery

Intended to challenge widespread perceptions of the post-industrial city, Terrain Vague includes the work of such prominent urban contemporary landscape photographers as Andy Anderson, Lewis Baltz, Edward Burtynsky, David Deutsch, Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Todd Hido, Doug Muir, Catherine Opie, Bill Owens, and Martha Rosler. “Terrain Vague” was the title of a talk by Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio, architect, critic and professor at the Escola Technica Superior d’Architectura in Barcelona. Rubio was curious about how photographers and architects have such divergent approaches to marginalized or “unresolved” urban spaces.

He writes, “Architecture's destiny has always been colonization, the imposing of limits, order and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal. Architecture is an instrument of organization, rationalization, and of productive efficiency.”

In comparison, Rubio points to the photographer of urban landscapes who uses the photographic medium to capture the nuances of terrain vague. Photographs portray these spaces just as they are -- unresolved, unintentional, idiosyncratic, complex and textured. He writes, “Art’s reaction is to preserve these alternative, strange spaces… and their uncontaminated magic.” As a reflection of the imprecise fluctuations of nature, they are a source of fascination.

Today, urban landscapes are places of flux. The city's core, once perceived as undesirable and problematic, is being re-inhabited in unexpected ways. As a result, cities are experiencing massive change. Inner city development is on the rise but space is limited and new (formerly occupied) sites are being explored. Vast amounts of in-town abandoned industrial buildings and empty spaces are being exposed. Amidst this shifting ground lie connections to history and memory. With a high degree of unpredictability, some places are fought for while others are torn down.

The curators of Terrain Vague – one a photographer the other an architect-- have drawn from the core of Rubio’s comments to select a collection of photographs that provide a catalyst for discussion and contemplation. When the architecture and photography are compared, questions arise. What is being built? What qualities of place will we experience or remember? Can looking at photographs inform a new critique of current trends in design?

The curators are both members of Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture. Ruth Dusseault is Artist-in-Residence and Chris Jarrett is a Professor of Architecture.

Terrain Vague will be exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh March 20 -June 20. 2004 as a program of the Heinz Architectural Center.

Contributing support for this organization is provided by the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Fulton County Commission under the guidance of
the Fulton County Arts Council, the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural
Affairs, Accenture, and the Massey Charitable Trust.

Generous support for Terrain Vague has been provided by John Portman

Review AJC

RELATED LECTURES

N.B. All lectures will be held at the School of Architecture’s Auditorium at 245 4th Street and will take place at 5:30 P.M.

Wednesday November 5th, 5.30pm ULF MEYER

Wednesday November 12. 5.30pm MARK ROBBINS

Thursday, November 13, 6:00-8:00 pm MARTHA ROSLER

MARK ROBBINS

Reflecting his training as an architect, the work of Mark Robbins bridges the fields of art and architecture. In photography, installation and site-specific projects, Robbins explores the complex social and political forces that contribute to the built environment. His series of multi-panel photographic collages, Households, relates domestic interiors with their inhabitants. Robbins documented over 40 households in New York, Boston, Washington, Nashville, and Columbus, Ohio, photographing individuals and couples of different ages and lifestyles – from a 200-square foot apartment in New York City to a series of log cabins in Nashville. The series seeks to reveal domestic life beyond its commercial and political representations, and to provide a counterpoint to images in mainstream design, fitness, and fashion magazines.

Robbins’ work has been exhibited at such venues as the Adelaide Festival, Australia, the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama Japan, the Queens Museum in New York, Clocktower Gallery of the ICA in New York, the Miami Art Project, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. A monograph focusing on his work, Angles of Incidence, was published by Princeton Architectural Press. Robbins has served as Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a fellow in the visual arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Currently he is the TVS Distinguished Critic at Georgia

MARTHA ROSLER

Since the 1970s, Martha Rosler has worked with photography, video,
criticism, performance, and in various other combinations of image and text.
Her point of view has been consistently critical and social, focusing on how
the use of image-forms such as photography, television and language is
conditioned by specific historical, economic, and political frameworks.

Her clinical photographs of airline terminals, which she has been
documenting since 1983, form a pictorial survey of international transit
centers. She confronts us with the bare bones of commercial facilities by
putting their anonymity in sharp focus. A selection of these photographs
are included in Terrain Vague.

As guest discussant, she will engage in a multi-discipline dialog about herwork, about critical photography and about the architectural issues that
this exhibition addresses.