Old Media/Old News
Old Media/Old News will open the 2010 Exhibition Season at The Luminary Center for the Arts on January 30, 2010 with an opening recption from 6-9pm. The curated group exhibition will feature internationally-recognized work from six artists working with concepts of news reception, media saturation and the role of the artist as documentarian and mediator of information in our current media climate.
Old Media/Old News proposes the artist as an alternative documentarian who engages, ingests, reimagines, or combats contemporary news sources and the mode of knowledge they presuppose. Positioning the six artists included as harbingers as well as combatants of the disposability and passivity we feel toward the contemporary media climate, Old Media/Old News is a document of the content stream made static and news invested in as art.
2010 Great Rivers Biennial winner Martin Brief will be creating new work from his Newspaper Series in which random selections of The New York Times are drawn from the day he was born and will conclude when the artist selects his birthdate. Jihoon Park, a Korean-born artist, is contributing One Day, One Deal, an engaging series of triptychs composed of video, baseball bats, and layered newspapers that transplants various media into new forms.
Xiang-Yang, a Chinese artist currently working in Philadelphia, will be showing Newsreel, which is comprised of peeled images from newspapers with scotch tape assembled into a sculptural film reel that simultaneously spotlights these anonymous faces and highlights their uniformity through repetition. Old Media/Old News will also feature a special installation work constructed from Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout Poems, which have been featured on NPR and are being published this year by Harper-Collins.
Artists Michelle Forsyth and Lisa Bulawsky have taken a more personal-historical approach to the news by forging intense, detailed relationships with past events. Michelle Forsyth’s work from her 100 Drawings series engages with sites of past tragedy through hyper-elaborate gouache drawings of common objects in order to reintroduce them as historical events as well as fostering ongoing media attention. Likewise, Lisa Bulawsky’s Flashbulb Memories monotypes explore the relationship between personal and cultural versions of history, reimagining such shared experiences as the Civil Rights movement and the Mt. St. Helens eruption as a personal memory reified into cultural understanding.
The opening reception will take place on Saturday, January 30th from 6-9pm and the exhibition will remain on view Wednesday-Saturday from 12-6pm each week through March 27th.
Links to each of the artists can be found below:
