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Mark Napier and Kelly Richardson at Pace Digital Gallery, Sept 18

BUSAN BIENNALE 2008

Theme : Expenditure
Period : Sep. 6 - Nov. 15, 2008 (71 days)
Opening Event : Sep. 6, 2008
Venues : Busan Museum of Modern Art and others
Number of Artists : 190 from 40 countries

Exhibitions :

Contemporary Art Exhibition
Director : Won-Bang Kim
Curator : Tom Morton, Nancy Barton, Michael Cohen,
Guest Curator : Azomaya Takachi, Francine Meoule
Sea Art Festival
Director : Seung-Bo Jeon
Busan Sculpture Project
Director : Jeong-Hyung Lee
Curator : Cedar Lewisohn
http://www.busanbiennale.org

Busan Biennale 2008 comprises three parts, including the Contemporary Art Exhibition, the Sea Art Festival, and the Busan Sculpture Project. Under the theme ‘Expenditure’, these three different exhibitions manifest each of their characteristics.

The Contemporary Art Exhibition is being held at the Busan Museum of Modern Art and the Busan Yachting Center, showing art works by 92 artists from 22 different countries with the theme ‘EXPENDITURE - as it is always and already excessive’. Audiences will have a chance to feel the overflowing energy of human beings, that is in the risk of breaking down the modern society. The Sea Art Festival is the unique art event that undertakes the feature of Busan. 78 artists from 27 countries comprehend the theme ‘Voyage without boundaries’ with the help of the natural setting of Busan. The Busan Sculpture Project attempts to expand the scope of public art, under the theme ‘Avant Garden’. It will exhibit the works of 20 artists from 10 nations at the APEC Naru Park.

Busan Biennale 2008 also opens accompanying events. Some of the major artists representing Asian contemporary art are invited to the accompanying exhibitions. The audiences will have an opportunity to enjoy variety of contemorary art works from all over the world, as numerous galleries in Busan are having special exhibitions to celebrate the opening of Busan Biennale 2008.

With all these exuberant events happening, Busan Biennale 2008 will certainly be at the center of the international art world’s attention.

Busan Biennale 2008 Participating Artists

Name / Nationality

Eduardo ABAROAE, Maxico
Aehee, Korea
Doo Jin AHN, Korea
Gwangjun AHN, Korea
Jae guk AN, Korea
Richard ANNELY, U.K
Vyacheslav AKHUNOV, Kyrgyzstan
Kriti ARORA, India
David ASKEVOLD, Canada
Nicole AWAI, Trinidad and Tobago
Hernan BAS, U.S.A
In Soek BAE, Korea
Ji Min BAE, Korea
Jonghun BAE, Korea
Seon Chi BAHK, Korea
Jonathan BERGER, U.S.A
Oliver BIRCHLER, Switzerland
Ross BLECKNER, U.S.A
Davin BRAINARD, Netherlands
Jesse BRANSFORD, U.S.A
Bruce La Bruce, Canada
Hua BU, China
Vadra CAIVANO, Italy
Yeo Chee Kiong, Singapore
Wenling CHEN, China
Tae Hun CHOE, Korea
Cody CHOI, Korea
Yea Hee CHOI, Korea
Yeon Woo CHOI, Korea
Sonja Lillebaek CHRISTENSEN, Denmark
Hye Jin CHUNG, Korea
Steven CLAYDON, U.K
Ronald CORNELISSEN, Netherlands
Cesar CORNEJO, Peru
Xian Ji CUI, China
Sue DE BEER, U.S.A
Warn DEFEVER, Netherlands
Chrystel EGAL, France
Doug FISHBONE, U.K
Min Gyeong GAM, Korea
Denis GLASER, U.K
Kenji GOMI, Japan
Wonsuk HAN, Korea
Yota HANAZAWA, Japan
Lyle Ashton HARRIS, U.S.A
Ku Young HEO, Korea
Roger HIORNS, U.K
Christopher k. HO, U.S.A
Hyun Sook HONG, Korea
Myung Seop HONG, Korea
Soun HONG, Korea
Irene HOPPENBERG, Germany
Teresa HUBBARD, Switzerland
Sook Young HUH, Korea
Kenny HUNTER, Scotland
Hea Sun HWANG, Korea
Juliette JACOBSON, U.S.A
Yeo-Ran JE, Korea
Lisa JEANNIN, Sweden
Rob JOHANNESMA, Netherlands
Dong hyun JUNG, Korea
Jaeho JUNG, Korea
Tellervo KALLEINEN, Finland
Kamin, Thailand
Yong Myeon KANG, Korea
Go KATO, Japan
Bharti KHER, India
Bumsu KIM, Netherlands
Chang Kyum KIM, Korea
Dong-Yeon KIM, Korea
Gi Young KIM, Korea
Hea Sim KIM, Korea
Jong Ku KIM, Korea
Kira KIM, Korea
Kye Hyeon KIM, Korea
Mi Ea KIM, Korea
Suk KIM, Korea
Sun Deuk KIM, Korea
Tae Jun KIM, Korea
Tai Kyun KIM, Korea
Pliver KOCHTA-KALLEINEN, Germany
Terence KOH, Canada
Dieter KUNZ, Germany
Surasi KUSOLWONG, Thailand
Philippe LALEU, France
Bei Kyoung LEE, Korea
Hansu LEE, Korea
Hojin LEE, Korea
Jin Kyoung LEE, Korea
Jong Bin LEE, Korea
Jun Yeong LEE, Korea
Kyoung Bok LEE, Korea
Sang Gill LEE, Korea
Sang Woo LEE, Korea
Seung-taek LEE, Netherlands
Soo Young LEE, Korea
Yong-Beak LEE, Korea
Guangxin LI, China
Ligyung, Korea
Ok Sang LIM, Korea
Young Sun LIM, Korea
Ren LIU, China
Wei LIU, China
Long March Project, China
Nate LOWMAN, U.S.A
Lisa LUYTER, U.S.A
Christina MACKIE, U.K
Victor MAN, Romania
Marlene McCARTY, U.S.A
Alex McQUILKIN, U.S.A
Marilyn MINTER, U.S.A
Mioon, Korea
Aiko MIYANAGA, Japan
Sunju MOON, Korea
TV MOORE, Australia
Gen MORIMOTO, Japan
Yasumasa MORIMURA, Japan
Robert MORRIS, U.S.A
Ruriko MURAYAMA, Japan
Myung Kyu NA, Korea
Tetzuya NAKAMURA, Japan
Yasuyuki NISHIO, Japan
David NOONAN, Austria
Eko NUGROHO, Indonesia
Yuki OKUMURA, Japan
Dennis OPPENHIM, U.S.A
Nipan ORANNIWESNA, Thailand
Orlan, France
Jeong Soon OUM, Korea
Christodoulos PANAYIOTOU, Cyprus
Gary-Ross PASTRANA, Philippine
Chong-Bin PARK, Korea
Mi Kyung PARK, Korea
Eun Young PARK, Korea
Adam PUTNAM, U.S.A
Michael RADECKER, Netherlands
Rachael RAKENA, New Zealand
Kelly RICHARDSON, Canada
Porntaweesak RIMSAKUL, Thailand
Stefan RINCK, Germany
Choong-hyung ROH, Korea
Nigel ROLFE, Ireland
Roxlee, Philippines
Aida RUILOVA, U.S.A
Karen RUSSO, Israel
Pinaree SANPITAK, Thailand
Ilan SANDLER, Canada
Larissa SANSOUR, Palestine
Martin SASTRE, Uruguay
Hiraki SAWA, Japan
Sara SCHNADT, U.S.A
Andreas SCHULENBURG, Germany
S.E.A. PROJECT(Team), Vietnam / Laos / Philippines / Thailand,
Joungguk S?, Korea
Fiona SHAW, U.K
Jim SHAW, U.S.A
Jio SHIMIZU, Japan
Moo Kyung SHIN, Korea
Jeoungeun SHON, Korea
Karina SMIGLA-BOBINSKI, Poland
Han Sam SON, Korea
Mong Joo SON, Korea
Blou SOUP, Russia
Sam SU MENG_HUNG, Taiwan
Prateep SUTHATHONGTHAI, Thailand
Koki TANAKA, Japan
Philippe TERRIER-HERMAN, France
THERKILDSEN, Sixten, Denmark
Titarubi, Indonesia
Montri TOEMSOBAT, Thailand
Mitsuru TOKUTOMI, Japan
Jill TRAPPLER, South Africa
Ryan TRECARTIN, U.S.A
Kuang-Yu TSUI, Taiwan
Naoyuki TSUJI, Japan
Guido VAN DER WERVE, Netherlands
Erik VAN LIESHOUT, Netherlands
Alan VEGA, U.S.A
Luyan WANG, China
Marnie WEBER, U.S.A
Andro WEKUA, Georia
Tien Wei WOON, Singapore
Miao XIAO CHUN, China
Fuyuki YAMAKAWA, Japan
Ju Hae YANG, Korea
Qian YANG, China
Tae Keun YANG, Korea
Yeorrock, Korea
Ji Hun YOO, Korea
Seung Jae YOO, Korea
Young-Seok YOON, Korea
Harumi YUKUTAKE, Japan
Ivette ZIGHELBOIM, Venezuela
Liliane ZUMKEMI, Switzerland

For inquiries, contact:

Busan Biennale Organizing Committee
23rd Floor, Busan City
Hall Yeonsan 5-dong
Yeonje-gu, Busan Metropolitan City
Tel. 82-51-888-6691~9
Fax 82-51-888-6693
bbiennale@paran.com
http://www.busanbiennale.org

Contact:

Tel. 82-51-888-6691~9
Fax 82-51-888-6693
bbiennale@paran.com
http://www.busanbiennale.org

The Twilight Avenger is not what he seems

Slowness informs Richardson’s new projection piece as well. In this six-and-a-half-minute video, you find yourself gazing at a dim, misty, blue-green forest, being startled by the hooting of an owl, and luxuriating in the ambient sounds of crickets and frogs. Then a stag appears, tentatively nosing into the picture frame from the right, and then, eventually, coming directly into the central clearing in this mystical forest where, dignified and confident, it sometimes confronts the viewer directly and sometimes just sort of mooches around before disappearing again.

But this stag seems far from your run-of-the-mill Hinterland Who’s Who sort of stag. For one thing, it glows with an eerie, scintillating greenness, an aura that speaks to everything from the special effects in tawdry horror films to runaway radioactivity. In a recent e-mail, Richardson - a Canadian who lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, but who is currently vacationing in Algonquin Park - notes that she filmed the stag in Jedforest Deer and Farm Park just across the border in Scotland. True to the collaged nature of our media-assembled world, the landscape itself, she adds, was filmed in England’s Kielder Forest, while the foreground tree has been electronically transplanted from Algonquin Park.

The whole tableau has been amplified by what Richardson refers to as “heavy colour manipulation, added fog, added light rays” which “contradict the natural light in the image … alluding to another great light source.”

The stag itself, she continues, had to be digitally cut out of every frame, about 2,500 frames in total (it took months), “in order to place it in its new environment, adjust the colour and add the glow and vapour.”

A digital stag, then, that’s more fabricated than found. But what about the work’s strangely trashy, strangely poetic title, Twilight Avenger? Well, the twilight part is clear enough (amusingly, the video was made in daylight, with the twilight-ness added afterwards). Some viewers see a connection with Harry Potter simply because, as Richardson notes dyspeptically, “there is a stag featured at some point in one of the films.”

“The title,” writes Richardson in her north-woods e-mail, “actually references the fantastical worlds created in online gaming, where more and more people are opting to trade their ‘real’ life for one that is ‘make believe.’ ”

Clearly, Richardson’s noble if glowing stag, while indisputably an electronic chimera in an artificial world, still maintains much of the symbolism conventionally attributed to it: the stag has been seen as the messenger of the gods; it is a form of the Tree of Life (antlers as branches); it’s an emblem of regeneration (the antlers always re-grow); and imagistically, it is related to ideas about heaven and light, as well as to their opposite, the realms of night and the subterranean.

And so who is the Twilight Avenger? The stag itself? The stag, which, though merely a composite of digital effects, is still lofty and pure enough to embody a warning and a wake-up call - to stand for the triumph and perpetuation of old meanings over momentary zappiness? On the other hand, maybe it’s just what it is: a visionary green stag, browsing through twilight’s last gleaming.

Gary Michael Dault
The Globe and Mail 
Gallery Going
Saturday August 9, 2008

Nature’s calling
KELLY RICHARDSON QUESTIONS WHAT’S REAL
DAVID JAGER

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s so unnerving in Kelly Richardson’s video and photographic work at Birch Libra lato. It could be the way the unnatural is continually made to appear natural.

While it might seem that Richardson is making a statement about the colonization of nature by techno logy, her environments are themselves high ly constructed, artificial affairs.

In Twilight Avenger, the most arresting piece in the show, a magnificent stag preens in a forest, evades the camera and finally allows itself to be seen grazing before it trots off into the wild. The background, however, is a meticulously recreated com posite of several forests put to gether with painterly care. The stag itself is a bright phosphorescent green, surrounded by a writhing cloud of greenish vapour.

This painstaking frame-by-frame animation belies the almost convincing natural setting and leaves us to wonder, Is the green stag real or a CGI creature worthy of a summer blockbuster?

In Wagon’s Roll, another video installation, a car’s jump off a cliff is curiously undramatic. The wheels continue to spin as it hangs frozen in mid-air. Richardson’s surreal suspension of this cliché of filmic action makes us wonder what, if anything, will happen next.

This sense of anticipation and dislocation is part of what she’s aiming for in subverting the narratives Holly wood has conditioned us to expect.

Her photos, many of them stills from earlier video projects, also generate a feeling of uneasiness. There’s always a sense of something gone slightly awry – on more than one level.

The work suggests that as we alien ate ourselves from nature, we might also be losing our ability to directly experience the unmediated world.

Kelly Richardson: Rapture and Critique

Canada-trained, UK-based artist Kelly Richardson has become well known for her thoughtful artworks that toy wittily with the cinematic. The effectiveness of these is demonstrated partly in the increasing reach of Richardson’s work, with recent shows in venues ranging from Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum to Buffalo’s Hallwalls Arts Centre to London’s Nunnery project space.

Accordingly, Richardson’s current show presents two new video installations (one a projection) on her signature theme. Twilight Avenger conjures Harry Potter movies, pagan myths and urban legends alike with a glowing (perhaps radioactive? Or drug-induced?) stag traversing a forest. Wagon’s Roll (The Remake), a redo of a 2003 work, has a car remain suspended in action-flick-climax mid-air while the surrounding landscape continues to change in a deadpan, mundane fashion.

Both of these videos reinforce Richardson’s characteristic blend of audiovisual rapture and cinematic critique, a sense previously demonstrated in her reworkings of horror films like Frogs, In the Company of Wolves and Swamp Thing, and also seen more recently inExiles of the Shattered Star, which has fireballs rain down on an idyllic landscape. The results are always beautiful and apocalyptic, ridiculously silly and deadly serious—an appropriate mix for our jaded-yet-anxious age. (129 Tecumseth St, Toronto ON)

www.birchlibralato.com

Kelly Richardson: Twilight Avenger
Birch Libralato
July 24, 2008 – September 6, 2008
Reception: July 24, 2008 5-8 PM

Birch Libralato is proud to present new work by Kelly Richardson. Two new video installations and a series of photographs elicit the language of cinema to create fantastical tableaux reflecting split realities: part real, part imagined.

In the video ‘Twilight Avenger’ a glowing stag quietly walks through a dark, enigmatic forest in a dreamlike state. ‘Wagon’s Roll (The Remake)’ features the moment in an action film where a car flies off of a cliff. The wheels spin, clouds pass, cicadas buzz and smoke billows from the car all the while portentously suspended in mid air. Both wily and contemplative Richardson’s new work offers rich visual metaphors for our complicated ‘modern reality’.

Kelly Richardson was born in Canada where she studied fine art at the Ontario College of Art and Design (AOCAD with honours) in Toronto and media studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (MFA studies) in Halifax. Her works have been exhibited internationally at various venues including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, USA, 2008), HALLWALLS (Buffalo, USA, 2008), Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal (Montreal, Canada, 2007), The Nunnery (London, UK, 2006), Gwangju Biennale (South Korea, 2004), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Canada, 2003) and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2002). Her works were recently acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Albright-Knox and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Upcoming exhibitions include the Busan Biennale (Busan, South Korea, 2008) and Pace University Digitial Gallery (NYC, USA, 2008). She lives and works in the United Kingdom.

Twilight Avenger has been supported by ISIS Arts, UK.

The $50,000 Sobey Art Award, presented by Scotiabank, is given annually to a Canadian artist under 40 who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated. Organizers are pleased to announce the long-list of 25 artists selected by the curatorial panel for the 2008 Sobey Art Award.

WEST COAST AND YUKON: Althea Thauberger; Tim Lee; Scott McFarland; Mark Soo; Kevin Schmidt.
PRAIRIES AND THE NORTH: Daniel Barrow; Paul Butler; Theo Sims; KC Adams; Terrance Houle. 
ONTARIO: Kristan Horton; Luis Jacob; Terence Koh; H. Lan Thao Lam; Kelly Richardson.
QUÉBEC: Mathieu Beauséjour; BGL; Raphaëlle de Groot; Adad Hannah; Carlos and Jason Sanchez.
ATLANTIC: Andrea Mortson; Tonia Di Risio; Craig Francis Power; Mario Doucette; Craig Leonard.

The Shortlist for the 2008 Sobey Art Award will be announced on May 20, 2008. Selected work from the shortlisted artists will be featured in an exhibition hosted by the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum and will run from August 30 to October 13 of 2008. 

The winner of the 2008 Sobey Art Award will be announced during a gala event at the Royal Ontario Museum on October 1, 2008.
The 2008 Sobey Art Award Curatorial Panel comprises: Scott Watson, Director/Curator, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC; Anthony Kiendl, Director, Plug-In ICA; David Moos, Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Ontario; Nathalie de Blois, Conservatrice de l’art actuel, Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec; Gemey Kelly, Director/Curator of the Owens Art Gallery.
-30-
For more information please contact:
Svava Juliusson, Coordinator, Sobey Art Award
416-434-6883
juliusst@gov.ns.ca
www.sobeyartaward.ca

Sobey Art Award
C/O Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
1723 Hollis St., Box 2262
Halifax NS B3J 3C8
902 424 7359 fax 
www.agns.gov.ns.ca

THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT
Art 
 

Demented but Rewarding 
Moving Images Create Creepy Consciousness at Hirshhorn 

by Michael Coleman

Walking into the Hirshhorn Museum’s new exhibition, “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image,” is a lot like stumbling into someone’s creepy dream.

Dark, disorienting and a bit demented, the exhibition uses projection and film to create a sort of parallel consciousness. Though strange and at times uncomfortable, it’s also rewarding. The first of two parts, the current display is aptly subtitled “Dreams.”

According to the exhibition material, this first section “addresses film’s ability to transport viewers out of their everyday lives into states that lie between wakefulness and sleep, sending them on journeys into the darker recesses of the imagination.”

Following on the theme of how “the cinematic” impacts our perceptions, the second part of the exhibition, “Realisms” (which runs June 19 to Sept. 7), examines how documenting “real life” has been made easier with the advent of moving image formats, which at the same time have ironically blurred the line between fact and fiction.

“Today, the cinema is everywhere,” said Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s acting director and chief curator. “It is on television, your computer screen, projected onto buildings, and carried around with you on your iPod. The cinematic is in the way we perceive the world, in the way we speak, in the way we dream. We have no need to enter a movie theater to escape into an illusory world; life itself is just like a movie.”

And the Hirshhorn has certainly brought that movie to life. The surreal tour opens with a red backlit curtain, giving viewers a chance to actually “enter” the exhibition, or step into the movie. The soft billowy curtain, a 1998 work by Douglas Gordon titled “Off Screen,” invites us in and hints at the transforming experience ahead.

Darkened hallways are illuminated only by faint, neon-green arrows that point the way from one dreamscape to the next. Among the first—and most obvious—images one encounters is Andy Warhol’s famous film “Sleep,” a six-hour reel of poet John Giorno, who was his lover at the time. Showing nothing but Giorno sleeping, the film captures the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest—as if preparing our minds for the meditative pieces that follow.

From there, the exhibition gains in complexity. Grainy footage of mid-20th-century American family life on the farm hearkens to a more simple time. The wholesome images do indeed seem dreamlike when compared to today’s irreversible age of technology and terrorism.

Rodney Graham’s installation of an archaic Victoria 8 film projector—a massive relic of steel gears, knobs and pulleys—projects an image of yet another relic onto a darkened wall: the Rheinmetall typewriter, itself made obsolete by cinematic technology.

The exhibition’s first words are spoken by an odd, disjointed head attached to a puppet-like body. Tony Oursler’s “Switch” projects the face of David Bowie (I didn’t realize it was him until I asked) onto a small orb. The animated puppet spews pseudo-philosophy—something about all of us being in the same place at the same time and the meaning of it all—but most of us are transfixed by the image, not the words.

Another entrancing image is that of Fay Wray, the iconic heroine of the original “King Kong” movie who is seen here suspended in a repetitive, herky-jerky freeze frame captured at the precise moment that she first sees the beast. The very image of terror, Wray’s lithe, beautiful body vibrates so violently that it morphs into something grotesque. Dreams, as we know, have a way of turning the familiar into the foreign.

The exhibition’s fan favorite is undoubtedly Anthony McCall’s “You and I, Horizontal.” McCall invites us to actually be in his film as a single pinpoint of light from a small projector in the back casts geometric shapes onto a black wall. Standing in the midst of the projection, one can alter the images and step into a mesmerizing funnel of light.

Kelly Richardson’s “Exiles of the Shattered Star” transports us to an idyllic mountain landscape, where birds chirp while hundreds of flaming pieces of something—the sky itself perhaps—plunge into a placid lake. If this is the apocalypse, it sure is beautiful.

As part of a series of animated pieces, Chiho Aoshima dazzles with a depiction of an Atlantis-like world. Skyscrapers with eyes sway in the undulating waves, before morphing into plants and other images. The imagery evokes some of the haunting animated flower visuals from Pink Floyd’s landmark rock ‘n’ roll film “The Wall.”

Finally, as natural light returns toward the end of the exhibit, a stunning video focuses our attention on the rushing waves of Niagara Falls. The image of a natural landscape pulls us back into the real world, but the dreamy beginning is only steps away as the circular shape of the Hirshhorn itself casts us out just steps from the exhibition’s entrance.

Michael Coleman is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image / Part I: Dreams
through May 11
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue and 7th Street, SW
For more information, please call (202) 633-1000 or visit www.hirshhorn.si.edu.

http://www.washingtondiplomat.com/April%202008/b1_04_08.html

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Podcasts

Joanne Gold and David Miller on “The Cinema Effect”

Joanne Gold and David Miller from the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis discuss “The Cinema Effect: Dreams” with curatorial research associate Ryan Hill. (43:45) Exiles of the Shattered Star is discussed last.