New Work by Nina Bovasso, Jean Shin, and John F. Simon, Jr.
on view at the University at Albany Art Museum, University at Albany,
State University of New York

June 28 through September 11, 2005

Artists’ Reception: Tuesday, June 28, 5:00-7:00 PM
Free and open to the public.

ALBANY, NY--- The University Art Museum is pleased to announce that Nina Bovasso, Jean Shin and John F. Simon, Jr. will each present new works in three concurrent exhibitions opening this summer.

The museum’s first floor will feature Accumulations, site-specific installations by Jean Shin. Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1971, Shin currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Shin’s expansive installations begin with a collection of discarded objects like broken umbrellas, worn shirts, old leather shoes, or outdated eyeglasses. Through a series of contemplative alterations she transforms these items into visually arresting assemblages of form, color, and texture that reveal the potential for new entities in the forgotten scraps that surround our daily life. Shin’s most recent installation, Pill Bottles, will incorporate thousands of empty donated prescription bottles to create a massive structure in the center of the museum’s first floor gallery. While each donated bottle represents one patient’s medical need, the staggering volume of bottles in Shin’s installation suggests multiple readings of contemporary pill consumption— from its life-saving potential to the more dangerous implications of excessive use. Comprised of a singular inorganic element, Shin’s installation takes on an organic life of its own as its hive-like form metastasizes within the museum space.

Shin recently participated in the Projects series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has had solo exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens (2003); Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City (2004); and Apex Art in New York City (1999). Selected group exhibitions include Make It Now at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens (2005); Counter Culture at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City (2004); Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004); and Custom Fit at Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn (2003). She was an Artist-in-Residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2004) and a recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award (2001).

The second floor exhibition, Deep in my heart there's a house that can hold almost all of you, will feature recent works on paper and new wall drawings by Nina Bovasso. At once playful and fastidious, Bovasso’s images are constructed with an eye toward decorative ornament and rigorous abstraction that evoke influences as diverse as Philip Guston, 60s textile design, and Charles M. Schulz. Her drawings feature tightly orchestrated color and complex clusters of dots, ellipses, eddies, and patchwork swirls that burst across the surface like a chaotic-force-field on the verge of an indecipherable transformation. By merging several large-scale works on paper with the museum’s surrounding architecture, Bovasso’s wall drawings extend her inclusive vision of “turning a calm gesture into something heroic or elevating the hopeless toward the inspirational.”

Born in New York City in 1965, Nina Bovasso currently lives and works in New York City and Amsterdam, Netherlands. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam (2005); The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2005); Aliceday, Brussels, Belgium (2005); Perugi Artecontemporanea, Padova, Italy (2004); and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco (2002). Her work is included in the Prague Biennale 2: Extended Painting, Prague, Czech Republic (2005). She received The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award (2001), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2001), and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2000).

John F. Simon, Jr.’s exhibition, Stacks, Loops and Intersections: Code Sketches, in the museum’s West Gallery will feature new video projections that expand on his computer-based work. Although digitally-driven, his ongoing explorations into how the software age affects the creative process share an art historical kinship with the range of choices that artists like Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian faced in the realization of their art work. Charting the infinite variety of compositions and combinations found within a given aesthetic system, Simon’s projects include an online attempt to visualize infinity, a series of wall-mounted LCD screens that display perpetual color and pattern shifts based on Midtown Manhattan traffic patterns, and an installation of digitally laser cut tiles that turns the familiar symmetry of a centuries-old floor design into an open ended computer generated image.

Born in Louisiana in 1963, John F. Simon, Jr. lives and works in New York City. Simon has had recent solo exhibitions at Sandra Gering Gallery in New York City (2005, 2002); Alexandria Museum of Art in Alexandria, Louisiana (2005); Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, Tennessee (2004); SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2002); and Sandra Gering Gallery in New York City (2002). Selected group exhibitions include Seeing Double: Emulations in Theory and Practice at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2004); media _city seoul 2002 at Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea (2002); BitStreams at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2001); and Selections from the Permanent Collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2001).

In October 2005, The Whitney Museum of American Art and Printed Matter, Inc. will co-publish Simon’s new software and book, Mobility Agents: A Computational Sketchbook. Mobility Agents will be featured as a ”gate page” on Artport, the Whitney’s online gallery space for commissioned net projects, at the same time that it becomes available as a book and CD set.

For further information or visual materials, please call
(518) 442-4035 or visit our website at www. albany.edu/museum.
SUMMER HOURS: Tuesday through Saturday 11 AM to 4 PM