13 March – 19 April, 1997
Exhibition
Reception: Thursday, March 13, 6-8 PM
The Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce The Evidentiary Files, an exhibition by Los Angeles artist, Skip Arnold. The Evidentiary Files is a selection of documented performances by Skip Arnold from 1982 to the present. The exhibition includes photographs, videos, memoirs, blueprints, maps, letters (from angry girlfriends), and correspondence with galleries in Vienna, Linz, Cologne and Milan. In addition, Mr. Arnold will be performing guided tours of the exhibition at various hours of the day. The exhibition will open March 13 and run through April.
Skip Arnold's performance and body-based work evokes some of the effects used in the art of Chris Burden and the late Bob Flanagan. Arnold challenges the voyeuristic relationship between object and viewer inventing startling social contexts. Skip Arnold incorporates his audience into his work, demanding complicity with his discomfort and risk. "What is common to all my work," Arnold states, "is 'Skip' - Skip is the art work; the act of doing, my actions, my choices."
Arnold's videos and photographs reveal the range of his theatrical extremes; from passive (he was once mistaken for a corpse) to daredevilish. As a John Simon Guggenheim fellow, Skip Arnold took off in a cigarette boat at top speed to explore the Bermuda Triangle (to see if he could disappear?). Treasure Chest, an installation that documents all the equipment, maps, photos etc from Arnold's Bermuda Triangle performance, premieres in New York at the Spencer Brownstone gallery.
Artist Bio
In addition to his Guggenheim fellowship (1995), Arnold received a National Endowment for the Arts award (1993), and has exhibited internationally in such galleries as the Weiner Secession, Vienna, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California.