Exhibitions At The Physics Room

Exhibitions At The Physics Room

Physics is Pâté

Ms. & Mr.

16 September–11 October 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 15 September 2009, 5.30pm

Expanding their collaborative practice even further across space and time, Ms. & Mr.’s New Zealand debut Physics is Pâté promises to meld elements of their recent work with brand new audiences on this side of the Tasman.

Currently based in Sydney Ms. & Mr. have become well known for their retroactive collaborations with recorded traces from their former, unmarried, selves. Actively interpolating themselves into each other’s archival trace histories, for Physics is Pâté Ms. & Mr. reference Kip Thorne’s 1994 book Black Holes and Time Warps, and his domestic analogy which involves Thorne’s wife, their living room, a spaceship and two mouths of a wormhole to illustrate what could happen in the event that a wormhole is created to act as a vehicle to traverse space-time.

This relatable, though presently impractical, scenario seems at first glance to be a useful extension of domesticity. However, Thorne goes on to elaborate the effect of time dilation on the couple, “Carolee can travel backward in time by crawling through the wormhole, climbing into another at-the-ready spaceship and fly out into interstellar space and meet her younger self.” It is at this potentially paradoxical moment, Ms. & Mr. also position their own domestic science fiction, “Here, we locate the opportunity to collaborate with an alternate, archival version of ourselves. By ‘restoring’ and altering our personal home videos and childhood drawings, we create alternate junctures and relationships in time, both liberated from and complicated by the linearity of chronology. In our universe, Physics is Pâté.”

Ms. & Mr. are currently undertaking their MFA by research at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and have recently returned from Paris after a three month residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts. In 2008 Ms. & Mr. were curated into Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and in 2005 were awarded the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship for their work The Woman Who Mistook Her Husband For Art installed at Artspace, Sydney. They undertook a residency and mentorship with Pierre Bismuth in Brooklyn, New York during winter 2006/07.

Solo exhibitions include: There There Anxious Future (2009) and Heavy Sentimental (2007) at Kaliman Gallery, Sydney and The Woman Who Mistook Her Husband for Art at Gallery Wren (2004). Ms. & Mr. have also contributed to a number of curated group exhibitions, projects and screenings in Australia, Bangkok, Berlin, Brazil, Hong Kong, and Toronto. Included in these are: Show me Your World at Gitte Weise, Berlin (2008), and Song of Sirens at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2009). They are currently working on new commissions for Reality Check at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery (2009) and Illume at Campbelltown Arts Centre (2010). http://www.msandmr.net/

DANCE, SONS AND DAUGHTERS, DANCE! THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE AND MOLD!

Colby Bird, Rashawn Griffin, Leigh Ledare, Mads Lynnerup and Wu Ingrid Tsang. Curated by Martin Basher.

16 September–11 October 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 15 September 2009, 5.30pm

Traversing themes of hope, choice, play and language within the context of contemporary culture, The Physics Room introduces the video work of five young American artists to New Zealand audiences for the first time. Selected by New York-based New Zealand artist Martin Basher, each of the exhibited works negotiate these themes via the modulated and self-aware tone of a YouTube savvy generation.

Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s premise of ‘future shock’ as a shared hallmark or evidential imprint within all of the selected works, Basher’s curation challenges us to read into the disparate sequences on offer and reconsider the potential that may still be lying latent within the “historical crisis of adaptation” that Toffler foretold.

Now that everyone with a camera phone can tell their own story and share their representation with the world, YouTube brings us a truer chronicle of life in the world than we have had in all of history. Yet Basher and his selected artists are well aware that watching such footage is an experience in tracing a dance of many fictions.

Weaving the selected works together into a single presentation as DANCE, SONS AND DAUGHTERS, DANCE! THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE AND MOLD! Basher’s thematically diverse collation of recent works by Colby Bird, Rashawn Griffin, Leigh Ledare, Mads Lynnerup and Wu Ingrid Tsang is unified by their shared approach to questions about self, subject and representation. These works are candid, yet savvy, self aware and performative to the core.

Martin Basher graduated with a MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2008 having previously graduated with a BFA from the same institution in 2003. Basher splits his time between New York and New Zealand and is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland. http://www.martinbasher.com/

Colby Bird graduated with a MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004, having previously graduated from University of Colorado with a BFA in 2000. Bird is represented by CRG Gallery, New York. http://www.colbybird.com/

Rashawn Griffin graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a MFA, having previously graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore in 2002 with a BFA. Griffin is represented by Eva Winkeler Galerie in Frankfurt, Germany.

Leigh Ledare is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and received his MFA from Columbia University in 2008. Currently he teaches the Photography and Media program at the CalArts and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York.

Mads Lynnerup graduated from Columbia University, New York in 2008 with a MFA, having previously graduated with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. Lynnerup is represented by Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, Texas. http://www.madslynnerup.com/

Wu Ingrid Tsang graduated from UCLA, Los Angeles in 2007 with a MFA, having previously graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2002. He lives and works in Los Angeles where he co-organises the club Wildness and the project space Imprenta. http://www.ingridtsang.com/

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