Opening Friday, September 9: Jennifer West and John Houck
Franklin Art Works is pleased to present a film installation by the Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer West and prints by the New York artist John Houck. The exhibitions will open with an opening reception on Friday, September 9, 2011, from 6 to 8pm. The exhibitions will remain on view through October 29. This is the first exhibition in Minnesota for both artists.
In the Main Gallery
Jennifer West: Mascara and Mussels
The Los Angeles-based artist will show two new film projections created by manipulating the film celluloid by hand to a level of performance.
Jennifer West is known for inviting others to participate in her processes of exposing film stock and/or applying unusual materials directly to it, creating the resulting imagery. In the past she has doused film emulsion with perfume, Jack Daniels or pepper spray, skateboarded on it or dragged it through tar pits. The destroyed and distressed films are then digitized and shown as looping video projections, and the result is a mesmerizing, continuous abstraction.
West’s titles reveal the entirety of each work’s production, with the exception of the final step of digitizing the film negative.
The film still at top is from the work, Just Kids Film Necklace - for Patti Smith Film (65mm film negative RAY-O-GRAM made by laying 100 foot long necklace atop the film negative, exposing it with colored flashlights - made in front of live audience in Rome, Italy - featuring 100 foot long leather necklace strung with pasta and mussel shells collected in Rome, and sea shells, eucalyptus pods and a few feathers from California - flashlights performed by students from Rome: Nicloletta Guglielmucci, Ludovica Palmieri, Alessia Notarangelo, Lorenza Bessone, Elisabetta Masala, Givlia Fontani, Damaride D’Andrea, Claudia Cavaliera, Antonio Pizzolante, Saverio Verini, Cristina Meregaglia and Mariah Csepanyi and Jwest).
Also on view will be West’s first black-and-white film, titled, Mascara Warshak Film (35mm film leader brushed with mascara, intense black, deep purple/fascinating violet, azure blue, curling - mascara brushing by Monica Kogler and Jwest ).
Jennifer West has exhibited internationally at venues including the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, the Seattle Art Museum, Kunstverein Nuremberg, ICA Philadelphia, the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), The Drawing Center (New York), the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, Massachusetts), White Columns, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, the ZKM Museum for New Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), Art Statements 39, Basel (Switzerland) and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, among many other venues. West received an MFA from Art Center College (Pasadena). She has been commissioned for special projects and exhibitions at The Aspen Art Museum (2010) and at The TATE Modern (2009), and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2011). West is represented by Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles and Vilma Gold, London.
In the Project Space
John Houck: Aggregates
The New York artist will present selections from his Aggregates series of archival pigment prints.
Using custom-written software, John Houck generates every possible combination for a given grid printed (i.e., 2 x 2 or 3 x 3) as a contact sheet on photographic paper. These contact sheets are creased and re-photographed several times. This process creates layered borders that reveal the construction of each piece and adds its own layer of information, breaking the rigid system of the grid. By physically creasing and re-photographing these repetitive contact sheets, Houck reconciles the digital ground of photography and shows us the failures and ruptures in today’s algorithmic basis of photography.
John Houck has exhibited extensively, at venues including the Hammer Museum, The Kitchen (New York), REVERSEVENT (Los Angeles), the Orange County Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, and Centre Pompidou (Paris). He has studies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Whitney Independent Study Program and received an MFA from UCLA.
