Mary Lucier @ Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC - "Leaving Earth" Video Installation Exhibition

Mary Lucier: Leaving Earth 

Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York 

January 19 – March 2, 2024 

MARY LUCIER

Still from Leaving Earth, 2023

© Mary Lucier. Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery

Cristin Tierney Gallery presents Leaving Earth, an exhibition of new video work by MARY LUCIER. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Leaving Earth is a multi-channel video and sound installation inspired by excerpts from the final journal of Mary Lucier’s late husband, the painter Robert Berlind. In this journal, Berlind fearlessly documented his thoughts on his impending death from a terminal illness. His writings reflect his appreciation of life with a remarkable lack of anxiety about the inevitable end—more curiosity than dread.

The imagery in Mary Lucier’s work consists of sequences of protean video and still images filmed in both her domestic and working environments. Most were shot after Robert Berlind’s passing, reflecting the world as she experienced it during his final days and after. Berlind’s terse epigraphs appear throughout as white text on a black background, serving as evocative companions to the flow of images in Leaving Earth.

pictures already formed

more remembrance than presence.

Mary Lucier describes this nine-channel installation as one where "words, pictures, and sound become interchangeable, not serving as descriptions but as a rumination on reality and a form of coping." Unlike much of Mary Lucier’s earlier work, it does not follow a synchronous and sequential internal structure, instead allowing for random juxtapositions, repetitive thoughts, and the possibility of chaos to occur, reflecting the potential disarray in the dying man's mind. The pictorial narrative in Leaving Earth is underscored by Robert Berlind's description of his mental state:

a succession of discontinuous moments occur

then disappear

without the elemental structure of sequence

And yet . . . I forget to fear death

MARY LUCIER (b. 1944, Bucyrus, OH) has been noted for her contributions to the form of multi-monitor, multi-channel video installation since the early 1970s. Her work prior to her introduction to video was largely concerned with manipulation of the black and white image through a graphic performative process. She also produced several live performances with the feminist video collective Red White Yellow and Black (along with Shigeko Kubota, Cecilia Sandoval and Charlotte Warren) at the original Kitchen in 1972 and '73. Archival materials from this collective were also exhibited in 2023. Her latest multi-channel video installation Leaving Earth will be exhibited at the Catskill Art Space in the summer of 2024.

Mary Lucier's video installations have been shown in major museums and galleries around the world. Many now reside in important collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and the National Academy of Design, NY, among others. She has also produced a significant body of single-channel works which have been screened in museums and festivals world-wide.  From the austere black and white experiments of the 1970's to recent studies of Japanese Buddhist ceremonies and Dakota Sioux dances, these works acknowledge the influence of both Avant Garde and documentary practices in American art and cinema.

Mary Lucier has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Nancy Graves Foundation, USA Artists, the American Film Institute, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State council on the Arts, and the Japan-US Friendship Commission. Her teaching appointments have included the Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art and Art History at UC Davis; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; adjunct professor in the department of VES at Harvard University; and Visiting Professor in Video Art at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, among others. She lives and works in New York City and Cochecton, NY, where she has established a studio and archive for video art.

CRISTIN TIERNEY

219 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.cristintierney.com

François Bucher @ Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC - You Are (It Is) A Distorted Projection from a Single Light

François Bucher

You Are (It Is) A Distorted Projection from a Single Light

Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York

Through July 15, 2022

François Bucher 

Anisotropy #7- Big Bang, 2019 

Polarized filter, acrylic, PET, LED light panel 

120 x 60 cm

Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

Cristin Tierney Gallery presents You Are (It Is) A Distorted Projection from a Single Light, an exhibition of new sculptures and related works by François Bucher. This is Bucher’s second exhibition with the gallery. 

François Bucher’s practice builds on finding poetic connections between material and immaterial spheres. His work interrogates hierarchies of knowledge, fracturing the monolithic consensus reality of Western ways of understanding the universe and the body. Sources include post-structural philosophy, indigenous cosmo-experience, supra-dimensional encounters, and popular culture. Each body of his work—whether film, installation, sculpture, or photography—is united by the dare it poses to explore alternative layers of the human experience, and by the intuition that everything is intrinsically connected.

You Are (It Is) A Distorted Projection from a Single Light features François Bucher’s new acrylic light boxes made with PET plastic and polarized film. The significance of the light phenomenon occurring within each sculpture is multi-fold. When placed between two linear polarized filters, PET plastic expresses the phenomenon of birefringence (a ray of light is refracted into two rays heading in different directions). The resulting abstract images seem to float inside the acrylic structures, or to mimic abstract gravitational waves.

Polarization is also linked to the artist’s interest in non-linear time: “PET plastic is a derivate from fossil fuels, made entirely of ancient biological life; therefore, it has a molecule akin to the one in our DNA. It is interesting to note that this phenomenon of light—anisotropy and/or polarization—is the most important tool when engaging with the exploration of deep time, including both the seconds after the Big Bang and the geological history of our own planet. Oil wells are also discovered using anisotropy.”

Much of François Bucher’s work borrows from the genre of science fiction, leaning on two of its most popular tropes: portals through time and hidden parallel realities. Referencing Contact by Carl Sagan, Planet of the Apes, and Chris Marker’s La Jetée as well as the artist’s personal experiences in the fringes of reality with the Taitas (shamans) in Colombia, he makes an argument for the attainment of inter-dimensional consciousness as a restorative experience, opening the doors for a healing of trauma both at the individual and collective levels.

In addition to his visual art, written text is an intrinsic component of François Bucher’s practice. His statement for You Are (It Is) A Distorted Projection from a Single Light lists some of the varying threads that connect his work without overly defining them. He cites cosmological physics, geological history, and futuristic fiction, but leaves space for the viewer to draw their own conclusions. He leaves us with this final sentiment: “An adventure of perception such as this, when followed all the way to its ultimate consequences implies losing a sense of linear time that keeps us bound. The past is here and now.”2

François Bucher (b. 1972) is an artist and writer from Cali, Colombia. His research spans a wide range of interests, focusing—as of late—on multi-dimensional fields and on other tropes from shamanism and science fiction, such as time “travel.” He contends that trauma acts as a portal through time, both at a collective and an individual level. Bucher’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennial, Marrakech Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Bienal de Cartagena, Bienal de Cuenca, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneve, Berlin Documentary Film Forum, Jeu de Paume, Prague Biennial, Tate Britain, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His writing has been published in the Journal of Visual Culture, documenta Magazine, e-flux journal, and Valdez. He holds a master’s degree in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Catastrophe of the Present, a book on his work from 1999 to 2016 written by Claudia Salamanca, was published in 2016. His studio is in Mexico.

1. François Bucher, Artist Statement, May 2022.

2. François Bucher, Artist Statement, May 2022.

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY

219 Bowery, Floor 2, New York, NY 10002

www.cristintierney.com

Joan Linder and Maureen O'Leary @ Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York - Slightly Surreal Suburbia

Joan Linder and Maureen O'Leary 

Slightly Surreal Suburbia 

Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York 

June 18 - August 6, 2021 

MAUREEN O'LEARY and JOAN LINDER

Left: MAUREEN O'LEARY 

The Trash at Night, 2021 

Oil on linen 

48 x 32 inches (121.91 x 81.28 cm)

© Maureen O’Leary, courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery

Right: JOAN LINDER

Wet Ones, 2018

Duct tape and foam 

7 x 3 ¼ x 3 ¼ inches (17.8 x 8.3 x 8.3 cm)

© Joan Linder, courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery

Cristin Tierney Gallery presents Slightly Surreal Suburbia, a two-person exhibition with JOAN LINDER and MAUREEN O'LEARY. The show features new paintings by O’Leary alongside works on paper and sculptures by Linder. 

For as long as suburbs have existed, life in their quiet communities has been a subject of intense interest. They are governed by particular rules of conduct and social expectations that set them apart from cities. Relationships among neighbors involve a strange commingling of secrecy and voyeurism. And underneath their ostensibly calm surfaces there is often a wealth of eccentricity and darkness hiding, as explored through many notable films, television shows, works of photography, books and more from the mid-20th century to today.

Linder and O’Leary live in Buffalo and Mt. Sinai, respectively, and like so many of us they have experienced life in suburban areas. In the last year, the two artists became deeply enmeshed with their surroundings as the pandemic curbed most travel and they found themselves spending more time at home. Slightly Surreal Suburbia showcases new works by both women devoted to the sights and people in the ‘burbs; together they are a consideration of domestic life outside of the metropolitan sphere.

Joan Linder has had a lifelong obsession with the passage of time, which she channels through inordinately detailed ink drawings and sculptures made from paper, foam and duct tape. Many of Linder’s works are life-size, forming near-perfect replicas of actual objects or people she has encountered. In Slightly Surreal Suburbia, Linder presents objects that capture the anxiety we all felt in our homes in 2020. They approximate the items they represent, but close looking reveals small imperfections and touches of the artist’s hand. Isolation Orders is a to-scale drawing of a letter Linder received with the governor’s state-wide order to shelter in place in March 2020. Wet Ones is a slightly-off reproduction of a container of antibacterial hand wipes, created painstakingly with slices of tape to approximate the in-demand good.

Maureen O’Leary’s paintings capture the oddness of the everyday in her neighborhood on Long Island. She presents fleeting, moody scenes viewed from her home and studio; in The Trash at Night, we see a man dragging a trashcan behind him, set against a backdrop of leafless trees and an ominous glowing moon. The sky is a mottled purple tinged with juicy reds and oranges, lending an eerie feeling to the already uncanny image. The Mail, March shows a tiny hand emerging from a darkened USPS truck to drop a letter in a mailbox. it is the only sign of life in the painting.

JOAN LINDER (b. 1970) is known for her labor-intensive drawings that contain thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of tiny lines. She has exhibited at Albright College, Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Omi International Art Center, Sun Valley Art Center, Weatherspoon Art Museum and more. Her work is held in the collections of The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Davis Museum, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, Progressive Corporation, West Collection and the Zabludowicz Collection. She studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Tufts University. Among her many awards and fellowships are residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Smack Mellon, Ucross Foundation, Art Omi, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, plus a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant.

MAUREEN O'LEARY's (b. 1965) paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. Her mundane scenes become substrates for experimentation with the application of paint and the evolving notion of what is real. O’Leary’s work has been exhibited at the Fondation des États-Unis, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Art Lab Tokyo, Midwest Center for Photography, Artspace, Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, Valdosta State University Fine Arts Gallery, Staten Island Museum, Meadows Gallery – University of Texas at Tyler, and more. She is the recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council – Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant and the Harriet Hale Woolley Fellowship from the Fondation des États-Unis. Maureen O’Leary has published two books: Belle Mort (2013, Paper Chase Press) and Look/Listen (2010, Look/Listen Press). Her work is held in the collections of the Fondation des Etats-Unis and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY

219 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.cristintierney.com

John Wood & Paul Harrison @ Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC - Bored

Wood and Harrison: Bored 

Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York 

Through June 12, 2021 

WOOD AND HARRISON

Bored Astronauts on the Moon, 2011 

Single-channel HD video. 20:00 minutes

© Wood and Harrison

Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery

Boredom as a subject has a significant legacy in contemporary art. Bruce Naumann has returned to it again and again. John Baldessari famously promised not to make any more “boring art” and artists as diverse as John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Yoko Ono have conjured up artwork after artwork where nothing happens. Literally. It is within this (boring) lineage that Cristin Tierney Gallery presents a selection of works by John Wood and Paul Harrison.

Boredom, as explored through video, sculpture, paintings and works on paper by the British artists, is both a source of creativity and a joke about the limitations, blockages, and failures experienced in the studio. In Bored Astronauts on the Moon, the artists present themselves as modern astronauts who stand or walk around in silence on a lunar landscape. The video was shot in their studio, on a set designed to look like the Moon. It is a destination synonymous with adventure and excitement, but any initial enthusiasm soon gives way to tedium as minimal amounts of action unfold over the video’s twenty minutes. As the artists explain, “For us it wasn’t about the quest to conquer the world or space, although it clearly references that desire. It’s more about making an ongoing representation of the world, but all from the confines of our studio.”[i]

Chair/Gum further investigates the notion of boredom with similar absurdist humor. The sculpture consists of a readymade chair constructed with a wooden seat and metal legs. It could easily be imagined in a classroom or studio, but this is where the work’s ordinariness ends. Under the seat and stretching down to the floor are hundreds of pieces of chewed bubble gum, stuck together in one giant mass. A single piece of gum on the underside of a chair might suggest a disinterested student; an enormous wedge built from layers of gum applied over time beggars belief. How bored could one be to completely fill the space under their chair with pieces of the same kind of gum, over and over again? The supposition laid out by the artists is laughable.

Bored is the artists’ first solo gallery exhibition in the US. In summer 2020, the gallery released an online retrospective of their work titled The First 30 Years. It surveys some of the artists’ most significant videos, sculptures, drawings and more produced over three decades of collaboration. 

JOHN WOOD (b.1969, Hong Kong) and PAUL HARRISON (b.1966, Wolverhampton) make single-channel videos, multi-screen video installations, prints, drawings, and sculptures that elegantly fuse advanced aesthetic research with existential comedy. The artists’ spare, to-the-point works feature the actions of their own bodies, a wide variety of static and moving props, or combinations of both to illustrate the triumphs and tribulations of making art and having a life. The videos maintain a strict internal logic, with the action directly related to the duration of the work. Inside this "logical world" action is allowed to happen for no apparent reason, tensions build between the environment and its inhabitant, play is encouraged and the influences on the work are intentionally mixed. In their not-always-successful experiments with movement and materials, many of which critic Tom Lubbock has described as “sculptural pratfalls,” Wood and Harrison employ exuberant invention, subtle slapstick, and a touch of light-hearted melancholy to reveal the inspiration and perspiration—as well as the occasional hint of desperation—behind all creative acts. John Wood and Paul Harrison met in 1989 at the Bath College of Higher Education and have worked together since 1993. 

[i] Bruno Volpi, “Things That Happen,” Dazed (February 23, 2012): 

https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/12718/1/things-that-happen

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY

219 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.cristintierney.com

Alois Kronschlaeger @ Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC - Kind of Blue

Alois Kronschlaeger: Kind of Blue

Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York

May 21 - June 30, 2021 

ALOIS KRONSCHLAEGER

Scale model of Alois Kronschlaeger’s Kind of Blue, 2021

 Basswood, Ultrasuede fabric.

© Alois Kronschlaeger

Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

Cristin Tierney Gallery presents Kind of Blue, a temporary immersive installation by ALOIS KRONSCHLAEGER in a former retail space below the gallery on the Lower East Side. This is the artist's fourth project with the gallery.

Viewed from the street, Alois Kronschlaeger's installation rises like a cresting blue swell inside of the space. Beneath the undulating blue forms is a 1500 square-foot gridded structure of 2 x 2-inch wooden planks, covered with almost 500 yards of blue Ultrasuede fabric. Alois Kronschlaeger has carved into the framework, creating a topographical landscape that rises and falls as it slopes away from the entrance. The fabric has been carefully bunched and draped over the planks to create an enormous, continuous, rolling wave of vivid blue.

The artwork is designed to be immersive. Pathways in the grid allow visitors to walk around, on top of, and through the work. The interior structure of the piece is gradually divulged as one moves through it; what was soft and pliable on the exterior is revealed to be a highly structured, geometric form underneath.

Kind of Blue is named after the classic album by Miles Davis, which was conceived and recorded in New York City. It is a personal favorite of Alois Kronschlaeger's, who often listens to the album while working in his studio. The nature of Alois Kronschlaeger's installation echoes the central tenet of jazz music: rolling themes and variations occurring within a structured program. On the surface, the blue fabric appears loose and flowing, its exact shape organic and haphazard. But underneath it is in fact a very rigid structure--a support which allows the blue fabric to be "improvisational."

The installation's location on the Bowery is significant. As the oldest thoroughfare in Manhattan, parts of it were likely used thousands of years ago by animals crossing the island to find fresh water. With its undulating blue surface, Kind of Blue references both this search for water as well as the hills of Manhattan's original geography.

Kind of Blue's materials will be recycled or repurposed by the artist at the conclusion of this installation.

ALOIS KRONSCHLAEGER (b. 1966, Grieskirchen, Austria) creates site-specific installations and abstract sculptures that use geometry to explore environment, light, space, and time. His work has been exhibited at such international institutions and festivals as The Bruce Museum of Arts and Sciences, The Figge Art Museum, Yuan Art Museum, MOCA Tucson, MAC Lima, and Islamic Arts Festival, among others. He has completed multiple public installations and commissions in Mexico City, Grand Rapids, Sarasota, Lima, Tucson, and Miami. Alois Kronschlaeger lives and works in Brooklyn and Mexico City.

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY

219 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.cristintierney.com