"Double Feature: New Works by Nick Crowe and Gary Hill"
2000-10-28 until 2001-01-15
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, CA, USA

From October 28, 2000, to January 15, 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Double Feature: New Works by Nick Crowe and Gary Hill. Organized by Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA curator of media arts, the exhibition spotlights The New Medium by Nick Crowe and Gary Hill's Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) Notes Weil, These two works were not conceived as one exhibition, but the juxtaposition of the installations provides a fascinating examination of our relationship to an increasingly abstract social structure.

Nick Crowe

The New Medium, 2000

This new work by Nick Crowe reveals a fascination with funereal culture on the Web. The New Medium focuses on text messages sent by friends and relatives to recently deceased loved ones who have been uploaded--not to heaven, but to the Internet.

The New Medium consists of a series of 15 glass panels hand-engraved with screenshots of selected Web pages pulled from the Internet. Wall-hung and illuminated, these Web pages appear as fragile line drawings rendered in shadow in an environment washed with white light, suggesting a dematerialized and unearthly context. The New Medium examines a growing spiritual investment in cyberspace, in which the computer becomes a medium through which to speak to the dead.

A number of Web sites currently serve as memorials that may be visited for years to come. Examples include the worldwide cemetery at www.cemetery.org and Imminent Domain at www.imminentdomain.com.

Previous projects by Crowe include The Citizens, 1999, an investigation of personal home pages, published as a book by Book Works and as a downloadable film by Channel. The artist also coproduced Mugger Music, a performance in New York City commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He recently exhibited The 10 Point Plan for a Better Helsinki, 1998, at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. Further information about Nick Crowe's work is available at www.nickcrowe.net.

Gary Hill

Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) , 2000

Since his first experiments with video in the mid-1970s, Gary Hill has used the time-based, feedback properties of the medium to explore the nature of perception. The artist's inquiry takes place through an ongoing examination of the relationship between language and image, within which the body occupies a central role as both subject matter and, more generally, as presence. This presence exists at many different levels: as image, sound or text and in the viewer's physical immediacy.

Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) embodies these qualities in a very intense and physical fashion, engaging the viewer in a somewhat disorienting and confrontational manner. Associations arising from the experience of Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) are vast and highly personal, yet they seem to evoke a sense of anguish, displacement and flight from memory. A clip from this work is available at http://www.donaldyoung.com/garyh.htm.

IMAGE:
Gary Hill
Remembering Paralinguay (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson),
2000
Slide-channel video/sound installation

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of California

Other Important Exhibitions in San Francisco