Ann Lislegaard 25 October to 20 Decemeber 2008 Opening reception October 25th from 6 to 8 pm Please note that the gallery will be open by appointment only from December 21 to January 6.
Join us on Thursday, January 15th from 6 to 8 pm for the opening of our next exhibition:
Murray Guy is pleased to present two major digital animations by Ann Lislegaard: Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard), 2006 and The Left Hand of Darkness (after Ursula K. Le Guin), 2008. These works comprise the second and third parts of a trilogy of 3D animations based on science fiction novels that began with Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany), exhibited at Murray Guy in 2005.
This trilogy continues Lislegaard�s longstanding investigation into spatial perception and cognition and, in particular, divergent forms of narrative. She draws here on science fiction not to illustrate its imaginative content but rather, as Frederic Jameson articulates it, because of science fiction�s potential to provide �something like an experimental variation on our empirical universe.� The works reference modernism and historical visions of the future to reflect on our present triangulation of space and knowledge and temporality; as a whole, they comprise a far-reaching investigation into the structuring of cognition in the digital age.
The Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) is a looping double screen animation showing a modernist glass hotel in a tropical jungle that is slowly invaded by crystalline growth. Text drawn from Ballard�s 1966 novel, which describes a viral crystal found deep in the rainforest that petrifies all organic matter, mingles intermittently with shifting digital images of shadows and the jungle seen from vague interior spaces. Taking the glass house as conceit for a modernist structuring of knowledge, Lislegaard�s animation directly references the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi�s 1951 Glass House, and the work of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, who investigated crystalline and organic structures as a means of articulating nonlinear time.
Set in a similarly extreme climate, The Left Hand of Darkness (After Ursula K. LeGuin) is a three-channel projection that draws on LeGuin�s 1969 novel describing an icy planet populated by a single sex of androgynous humanoids. Pages of the novel are inscribed on top of another and rotoscopic images spin next to drawings of male and female genitalia. Here identity and behavior seem at once both paralyzed and in a state of constant flux; the novel�s radical re-imagining of gender is inscribed in a fluid space between cinema, architecture and writing. As in The Crystal World, Lislegaard works to reconfigure polarities�between interiority and exteriority, male and female, organic and inorganic�in an explosively horizontal digital terrain, where nothing aligns as we would expect.
Ann Lislegaard lives and works between Copenhagen and New York. Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) was recently on view as an outdoor installation in The Light Project at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, and was originally commissioned for 27th Bienal de S�o Paulo in 2006. Lislegaard has had numerous solo museum exhibitions, including presentations at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2007); Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2004); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland (2002); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1999), among others. She represented Denmark at the 51st Bienniale di Venezia in 2005 and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle opening in May 2009.
Gallery News
Matthew Buckingham's recent installation "Everything I Need" will be on view at The Jewish Museum, New York in the exhibition Theaters of Memory: Art and the Holocaust opening on November 1 and running through February, 2009. Buckingham's work is also currently on view in Reality Check at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, in The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art at the CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College, in The Sound I'm Looking For, Part 1 at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, and in Framing an Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography at Wesleyan University Art Gallery.
Francis Cape will be feautured in Prospect 1. New Orleans, the first biennial of New Orleans, curated by Dan Cameron and opening November 1. His work will also be on view starting November 6 at the Metrotech Center in Brooklyn, New York in an exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund, and his solo exhibition It Happened Here is on view through November 21 at the Marywood University Art Gallery.
Alejandro Cesarco's work is on view through November 9 in The Archeology of Longing at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris.
Patricia Esquivias will be featured in the exhibition Empowerment, opening on October 18 at La Fundaci�n Arteria at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Arts in Bogot�, Colombia.
Kota Ezawa's work is on view through February 1 in Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding, organized by The Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Parsons: The New School for Design, New York, and through December 7 in Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photographyat the Wesleyan University Art Gallery. His solo exhibition, Brawl, will open on November 1 at the Luckman Gallery, Cal State University, Los Angeles.
An-My L� currently has a large group of photographs on view in the exhibition On the Subject of War, running through January 25 at the Barbican Gallery, London. Her work is also currently on view in The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art at the CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College, through February 1; Of People and Places at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Art Gallery, through December 4; and Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography, through December 7 at the Wesleyan University Art Gallery.
In addition to her solo exhibition at Murray Guy, Ann Lislegaard's work is currently on view in Reality Check at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, and In the Space of Elsewhere at the Stanley Picker Gallery, London.
Barbara Probst has a solo exhibition on view through December 7 at Domaine de Kerguehennec - Centre d'Art Contemporain in Bignan, France. Her work is also currently on view through January 25 in Role Models at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
Beat Strueli has solo projects on view through October 25 at BALTIC in Newcastle, UK, and through November 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, Krakow, Poland. His work is on view in the exhibition Objectivit�s at ARC, Mus�e d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris through January 4 and in An Urban History of Photography at Museum Folkwang, Essen through January 11. Later this month he will have a major video installation on view at JFK Airport in JetBlue's new Terminal 5, the renovated landmark Saarinan TWA Terminal.
