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February Issue 2003
Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, Offers New Exhibitions
The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC, is presenting the exhibitions, Pure Light: Southern Pinhole Photography, on view in the Center's Main Gallery, and Steina: Borealis, on view in the Center's Potter Gallery. Both exhibitions will be on view through Apr. 13, 2003.
Writings on the process of pinhole photography can be traced back to more than 4,000 BC and the fact that light can pass through a small aperture and give birth to an image continues to fascinate artists and scientists to our present time. SECCA is pleased to present Pure Light: Southern Pinhole Photography, an exhibition of recent work from over twelve artists from six states. From the ghostly images of a recreated Southern past in the works of Willie Anne Wright to the body images of Shawn Linehan, the artwork provides many avenues for discovery through the medium of pinhole photography. The range of works is in keeping with the wild array of cameras that these artists use - some of which are professionally manufactured while others are hand built from cereal boxes and other simple devices. Linda Samuels and her architecture students from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte built a 14' long, six-thousand pound trailer called the Mobile Studio Satellite, a traveling studio, tech center and part pinhole camera, and traveled across the United States, recording their trip.
Artists in the exhibition include: Pinky Bass (AL), Diana Bloomfield (NC), Bernadette Humphrey (SC), Jan Kapoor (GA), Gregg D. Kemp (NC), Rebecca Sexton Larson (FL), Edward Levinson (VA/Japan), Shawn Linehan (NC), Linda Samuels and the architecture students of the Mobile Gallery (NC based), Nancy Spencer (NC/NM), Leah Stubbs (TX), Willie Anne Wright (VA), Melissa Joi Slepekis (TX), and Sam Wang (SC).
For information on these and other pinhole artists, please visit (www.pinhole.com).
Steina Vasulka is one of the key figures in the early history of video art. She was born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1940 and studied violin and music theory. In 1959, she received a scholarship from the Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture to attend the music conservatory in Prague. In 1964 she joined the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. Vasulka and her husband Woody have been involved in forging new frontiers in electronic media for more than 30 years. They are credited with helping to establish the legendary New York performance space for new media, The Kitchen, in 1971 before moving to Santa Fe. Throughout the years, The Kitchen has helped launched the careers of some of the most important and innovative artists of our time, including Meredith Monk, Phillip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and many others.
In Borealis, Vasulka presents a beautifully moving multi-media projection and audio work that uses two projections and split beam mirrors to project images on four vertical translucent screens. In the work, the artist draws on the rolling waves of the chilly Icelandic surf of her homeland as her source material. Using a handheld camera, she takes stunning yet turbulent clips of nature, enlarges them, then turns them on end, literally and figuratively, so that they may be experienced as living abstractions on a scale equal to that of the human body. We seldom think of landscape as vertical unless we're lying down. Borealis also hints at Vasulka's training as a classical musician with its movements, refrains, counterpoints, and choruses. Nature, having somehow survived the 20th-century onslaught of archaic industrial insults, speaks in the only way it can, through stormy electronic images by an artist with roots both in urban culture and in a remote land still precariously preserved in ice.
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at 336/725-19041, e-mail at: (admin@secca.org) and on the web at (www.secca.org).
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