18 September – 1 November, 2009
Opening: Thursday 17 September, 7–9 pm
Colleen Brown, Paul Kajander (MFA ’07), and Kara Uzelman
This exhibition features the work of Colleen Brown, Paul Kajander and Kara Uzelman in a variety of media: video, photography, sculpture, found materials, and text. Their treatment of objects and thematics will be loosely oriented around the trajectory that the title implies: a treatment of objects and cultural product that is both vacuum-like and explosive.The artists in this exhibition are process-oriented, collecting anything and everything into their orbit, simultaneously voiding inherited meaning and creating new meanings through recontextualization. The work in the exhibition will be treated as experiments in form, concept and embodiment.
Berlin-based artist Kara Uzelman, whose work has recently drawn from early 20th century sci-fi narratives, has created a new suite of drawings that reference scripts from 60 science fiction radio plays. Through Uzelman’s re-telling, the work uncovers, through physical and textual bricolage, a wholly new narrative. Colleen Brown’s work takes common objects and creates formally complex new sculptures that are both familiar and strange in their use of assemblage, colour and texture. Brown’s sculpture is both airy and dense, a confluence of forms whose relationship to one another seems nearly gravitational in itself: materials orbit one another, and, as they must, collide. Paul Kajander’s new video installation gathers a cluster of universes around a single self, juxtaposing sci-fi-like inspired interiors with ‘pre-literate’ wilderness. His work highlights a certain cultural absurdity-the weirdness of expressing oneself in a world of signs, the collective ridiculousness of our cultural products, an underlying sense of a world in flux, the anxious individual, and the importance of human connection amidst it all.
