Press Releases

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December 2003

Home Extension

Curated by Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk

On view at the University Art Museum
January 21 through April 10, 2004
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 21, 5:00-8:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public

ALBANY, NY — The University Art Museum is pleased to announce the exhibition Home Extension curated by Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk . This exhibition features works by ten international artists who respond to the theme of 'home' as a place of refuge, memory, support, occasional conflict, love, and connection. Through their work, an understanding of 'home" shifts from a physical place to a psychological space that is movable, transportable, and complex. The artists are Sebaastian Bremer, Beth Campbell, Fred Holland, Kimsooja Joachim Koester, Odili Donald Odita, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Karin Sander, Ward Shelley, Roman Signer.

Sabine Russ is a German writer and curator. Gregory Volk is a Brooklyn-based art critic and independent curator. He writes for Art in America and is a Visiting Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY.

In Home Extension, Volk and Russ bring together ten artists whose work relates in specific and idiosyncratic ways to the University Art Museum's, Edward Durell Stone-designed space. Four site-specific installations are planned.   Avoiding narrative, all of the works in Home Extension focus on how the transformative possibilities inherent in one element, such as color, light, pattern, or texture can elicit an instantaneous sense of catharsis.  

Sebastiaan Bremer's intricate and embellished ink drawings on old photographs extend the private domain of personal memory into the poetic realm of unfettered possibility and magical transformation.   In her video installation Same as Me, Beth Campbell records her daily routine in triplicate.   Without variation or release, Campbell carefully choreographs quotidian moments and turns them into a revelatory experience about the individuals place in the world. Fred Holland transforms a singular found or organic material like pennies, black-eyed peas, or onionskins into art works that echo processes historically associated with African-American traditions. Through repetitive acts such as slicing, hammering, and piecing together, Holland's ephemeral installations become personal testimonies to the magic imbedded in black folk art and the sensibilities rooted in home, migration, and longing.   In her sit specific installation, A Laundry Woman , Kimsooja presents brightly colored traditional Korean bedcovers suspended from the ceiling.   Resembling drying linen or unidentifiable flags, these disconnected emblems evoke a host of domestic possibilities including love, sex, rest, privacy, and comfort.   At the same time, the cloth is free flowing, transparent, and temporarily situated, all conditions that point to a nomadic existence. By resituating the simple bedcover,

Kimsooja foregrounds the complex issues that surround conflicted longings for both worldliness and stability. Modernist plans for utopian communities in remote geographic locales run amuck are the subject of Joachim Koester's haunting photographs.   In his neutral documentation of semi-inhabited landscapes, he reveals a stark disconnect between imposed constructs and the reality of living under their shadow.   Odili Donald Odita's outsized acrylic paintings fuse different idioms including art history, contemporary discourse, traditional African art, digital technology, and personal experience. Deceptively lyrical in appearance, each painting heralds the rewards of free-flow discovery and hybrid knowledge through a force field of vibrating color and zigzagging planes.   Ragna Róbertsdóttir's luminous minimal wall works are made out of lava chips from Icelandic volcanoes. Depending on the way light hits them, these elemental works channel the vastness of the Icelandic outside, with all its geological and mythical connotations, into the interior gallery space where they depict neither place nor thing, but embody both .   Karin Sander works across a range of media and disciplines to call into question habitual ways of seeing both within and outside the gallery context. Her interventions into existing situations --like her intensely polished wall segments that turn mundane surfaces into glimmering visual fields--impact the surrounding environment in unexpected ways. Under Sander's unflagging hands-on attention, the most innocuous surface or locale becomes a magical site where subtle sensory perception is transformed into full-blown revelation.   Ward Shelley 's hybrid explorations into how individuals occupy and navigate their immediate environment include video, interactive installation, and mechanical engineering. In each of these projects, Shelley proposes a journey defined by self-imposed obstacles. Whether turning a simple walk through the park into a monumental adventure or negotiating the twists and turns of a small cube with interior maze-like corridors, Shelly never passes up the chance to extract meaning out of lived experience, no matter how absurd the construct may be.   R ooted in the experience of conceptual art and the spectacle, Roman Signer presents a series of action sculptures that involve carefully planned and strictly executed plans. Usually enacted close to home, his simple and direct actions bring a poetic twist to the scientific concept of cause and effect.   By video recording each experiment, Signer leaves an aesthetically compelling and often comic trace of what happens when human folly butts up against the forces of nature.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES:

Sebastiaan Bremer has had recent solo exhibitions at Roebling Hall in Brooklyn (2003) and Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin (2003).   He will be showing at Air de Paris in Paris (2004).

Beth Campbell's recent solo exhibitions include Same as Me at Sandroni Rey Gallery in Los Angeles (2003) and Roebling Hall in Brooklyn (2002). Selected group exhibitions include Online at Feigen Contemporary in New York (2003); Hello My Name Is at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (2002); and Greater New York at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2000).

Fred Holland has had recent solo exhibitions at PPOW in New York (2003) and Momenta Gallery in Brooklyn (2002) and has been in recent group exhibitions at P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2003); The Drawing Center in New York (2003); and Exit Art in New York (1999).

Kimsooja's recent solo exhibitions include Mandala: Zone of Zero at The Project in New York (2003); Conditions of Humanity at Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon (2003); A Needle Woman at Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art in Warsaw (2003); Kunsthalle in Bern (2002); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art.

Joachim Koester's has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Nürnberg in Nürnberg (2003); Greene Naftali Gallery in New York (2000); and AstrupFearnley Museet in Oslo (1999). His work has been featured in group shows at Kunst-Werke in Berlin (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2002); Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2000); Documenta X in Kassel (1997); and the Johannesburg Biennial (1997).

Odili Donald Odita will have solo exhibitions at Galerie Schuster in Frankfurt (2004) and Galerie Schuster & Scheuermann in Berlin (2004).   He has had other recent solo shows at Matrix Art Project in Brussels (2003) and Florence Lynch Gallery in New York (2001). His work has been featured in group shows at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2003); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2003); Artist Space in New York (2002); Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2001); and The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York (2001).

Ragna Róbertsdóttir's recent solo exhibitions include At the Threshold of Visibility at The National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavík (2003); A Longing for Landscape at Horsens Kunstmuseum in Horsens, Denmark (2001); and Katla at Reykjavík Art Museum (1999). Selected group exhibitions include Three Walls at i8 Galleri in Reykjavík (2002); Confronting Nature at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (2001); and microwave, one at 123 Watts Gallery in New York (1999).

Karin Sander has had solo exhibitions at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2002); D Amelio-Terras in New York (2000); Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen (1996); The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1994); and at many other prestigious museums and galleries throughout Europe and America. Selected group exhibitions include A Simple Plan at James Cohan Gallery in New York (2003); In Full View at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2003); White Spectrum, Open Ends at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2000); and Skulptur Projekte in Münster (1997).

Ward Shelley will have a solo exhibition at Pierogi in Brooklyn (2004). Past solo shows include The Cube at Pierogi in 2001; Colony at Islip Art Museum in Long Island (2001); and Voyage Platform at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York (1998).

Roman Signer's work has been presented at some of the most prominent events in contemporary art including Documenta 8 in Kassel (1987); Skulptur Projekte in Münster (1997); and the 48 th Biennale in Venice (1999).   Recent selected solo exhibitions include Roman Signer , Sammlung Hauser und Wirth in St. Gallen (2003); Recent Works , Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo (2003); Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles (2002); and Roman Signer , Galleries I, II, & III at Camden Arts Centre in London (2001).

A fully illustrated color catalogue will accompany the exhibition

For further information or visual materials, please call (518) 442-4035 or visit our website at www. albany.edu/museum.
MUSEUM HOURS: Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. , Saturday and Sunday noon to 4 p.m.