Final Frontier
Skip Arnold, Brígida Baltar, Amanda Keeley, Zilla Leutenegger, Ho Siu-Kee
18 July – 30 August, 2002
Exhibition
Summer is the time for being out of doors, rediscovering one’s relationship to the environment, both natural and cultural. In this exhibition, five international artists will be using a variety of media, from performance to digital animation, to explore the interface between the body and the ‘world outside’.
Zilla Leutenegger is from Zürich, Switzerland, and will be having her first one-person exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery this coming season. Her DVD animation ‘Quicksilver’ (2002) features a mysterious bodily fluid, which transforms the artist from a position of expressive power and agency toward acquiescence to a greater force.
Brígida Baltar, who is from Rio de Janeiro, and represented Brazil at this year’s São Paulo Biennial, bases her work upon interactions with objects as solid as the walls of domestic interiors, or as ephemeral as the morning mist. For Final Frontier, she will be showing four DVDs and two large prints from her ‘Fog Collection’ and ‘Dew Collection’ projects.
Californian artist Skip Arnold, fresh from his performance at Art 33 Basel, will be showing two video works that document performance actions. In ‘Spin’ (1999), he performs a hypnotic dance, recalling every child’s first dizzying out-of-body experience. ‘Marks’, from 1984, features the artist wearing a ‘Captain America’ crash helmet, flailing against the walls of a confined white cube.
New York-based Amanda Keeley is concerned with the mysterious power of objects to promote desire and fantasy. In ‘Somewhere Better Than This Place’ (1998/99), a pair of 1950’s silver lamé heels, incorporated within a multi-media kinetic sculpture, act as the catalyst for an escape from the everyday.
And Hong Kong-based artist Ho Siu-kee, who exhibited at the Hong Kong / China pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennial, will be exhibiting a new video installation. ‘Counting’ (2002), uses the repetitive gesture of making then erasing ink marks on a mirror, to blur the distinction between the abstraction of numbers and the instinctual rhythms and movements of the body.
Ultimately, each of these artists is trying - through inserting themselves within their own work - to measure and define a relationship to the physical and social space which we all share.
Artist Bio
Participating artists:
Skip Arnold, Brígida Baltar, Amanda Keeley, Zilla Leutenegger and Ho Siu-Kee