FEBRUARY EXHIBITS

Maurizio Bolognini: Infoinstallations

curated by Enrico Pedrini

February 8 through March 2, 2003
Reception Saturday February 8 from 4 to 7 PM

Catalogue Available from the WAH Center/ Ulisse & Calipso:
"Maurizio Bolognini. Utopia and Infochaos"

Maurizio Bolognini "Sealed Computers" year 1992/2000

The Williamsburg Art & Historical Center is pleased to present Infoinstallations, an exhibition of new works by Maurizio Bolognini, curated by Enrico Pedrini.  The exhibition includes Sealed Computers, some of the artist's better known works.  Since 1992 the artist has programmed more than two hundred computers to produce continuous flows of random images.  He then seals them, so that they do not become connected to a monitor, and finally he leaves them to work indefinitely.  In so doing, Bolognini slowly and imperceptibly creates a parallel universe of information.
Works from the Varchi or Windows series will also be exhibited. These drawings are forms that are traced by Bolognini's programmed computers.

SMSMS, an interactive installation by Maurizio Bolognini was recently presented at Artmedia VIII in Paris. SMSMS (SMS Mediated Sublime) uses one of the programs used in the Sealed Computers.  The program, which traces white lines on a black background, produces infinite trajectories.  In his installation, the images are rendered visible and anyone can modify the software, and therefore the characteristics of the images,  by sending an 'SMS.'  Each time a new message is received, the system updates the algorithm according to the public's wishes and starts elaborating a new cycle of images.

Maurizio Bolognini is one of the most interesting Italian artists working with new technologies.  Since the late 1980s, Bolognini has worked with network communication techniques or 'teledemocracy' and has published several studies including 'Electronic Democracy' (Rome, 2001).  In his catalogue essay for Infoinstallations, Enrico Pedrini discusses the implications of Bolognini's art which extends cultural boundaries, and maps new territories of language. Infoinstallations also search for a new existential condition by promoting a creative participation in an artfully controlled chaos.

Mixed Media Paintings by Heung Mo Kim
Mysdreams:
Painting, process, matter

With his recent series, Mysdreams, Heung Mo Kim continues an investigation of the mysteries of transmutation and transubstantiation through the painting medium. Mysdreams works with painting's qualities and processes, and yet these paintings operate within a narrow spectrum, so that the painter has allowed himself, and the viewer, to explore the implications of limiting tonalities and materials. This limit is experienced rather like a freedom than a harsh constriction. The painter has avoided the medium's excesses, for example, of color, gesture, diligent spatial or figural representation, or an expressionistic stylized formalism.

Whese works represent an aesthetic departure from the Soulscapes. In this earlier series, a mostly black background was engaged as a field off of which the gesture of brighter, more saturated drips of color implied an energetic movement of the body in relation to the painting field. Although this movement occurred on paper, its original quality was given over to the paint and the collage. These elements created a new surface tension. The Soulscapes conveyed a sense of space on a grand scale. Their energy and dark surfaces stand in contrast to the modulated whiteness and delicate surface qualities of the Mysdreams, which seem to function on the scale of the microcosm, even as the diptychs here distinguish the edge of one space greeting another.

The paintings in the Mysdreams series are painted on rice paper, mounted on panel. With this group, the painter has moved to amplify the paper's inherent, essential qualities, those that represent its true nature and therefore, its truth or soul. The rice paper is strong, light, translucent, flexible. While the panel eliminates this flexibility, the paint itself is plastic. It soaks into or sits on top of the paper. The meta-whiteness of the paint layer reveals the paper in its purity. Together paint and paper have a discussion at the edges, of a grid-like pattern and the paper, at the seams of the diptych, through a gesture. Together these two materials form a skin for the panel. On this skin, the painter has inscribed mysterious markings, part of a body, of language. The lightness of these paintings suggest evanescence, a world of floating, charged bits of matter; these rhythmic, dappled surfaces reflect and diffuse a room's ambient light, so that the works are no longer discrete entities in themselves or even as a group, but become integrated with the environment in which they are hung. This effect draws the viewer in to a separate reality, to participate in a free-fall — an illusion of great space, the contents of which are generous and nonspecific. The Mysdreams liberate the viewer from literal constraints of space (graphic, ornamental, gestural), so that we, like the artist himself, can delve into a meditation within and upon these "mysterious dream" fields.

The paintings in the Mysdreams series offer a respite from an all-too-literal sensate world. In these and in his earlier works, Heung mo Kim has effectively changed a body's energy to a vibration of the soul, through a meditation upon light, space, and matter. — Debra Steckler, New York

An Exhibition of Paintings by Whitney Hamilton
Artist's Statement:
Whitney Hamilton grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and Birmingham, Alabama earning a BFA at Birmingham Southern College. While at school she visited New York City during a Jan term and fell in love with the constantly changing art world. Upon graduation she moved to Brooklyn to attend Pratt Institute for a year as an MFA candidate but found that her curiosity for film and theatre pulled her in a different direction.

Storytelling is a favorite pastime in the South. The folklore and colorful characters forever mark a point in time and perception evoking the strong gothic images of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Farming communities live close to the land and while there is a kind of innocent simplicity there is also the evidence of complexity, mystery and even danger. One must ask what lies just below the surface.

Photography by Francisco Schklowsky

"In my childhood I had many dreams.... I never dreamed to become a photographer. My first artistic vocation was poetry: at seven years old I dreamed I wrote a poem and woke up remembering it. Later my admiration for Arthur Rimbaud forbid me of taking my poems too seriously.

"In 1966 my father, then an amator photographer, offered me a beautiful Contaflex. My first picture represented the Loneliness of Man in the industrial world. A few weeks later went to see a Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs; I loved it and decided to become a photographer no matter what. For 34 years I have been doing personal photographic work. Very little has been published.

"Trying to capture moments of magic in everydaylife has been my purpose all along." — Francisco Schlowsky