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November Issue 2007
Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC, Features Three New Exhibits
Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC, is presenting the exhibits: Three Windows, featuring works by Jody Elff in the Norvell Gallery; Visible Traces, featuring works by Lori Esposito in the Woodson and Osborne Galleries; and Disposable Views, featuring works by Xiaoze Xie in the Young People's Gallery. All three exhibitions will be on view from Nov. 16 through Feb. 2, 2008.
Jody Elff
Visitors will become part of the art as Waterworks Visual Arts Center hosts a unique exhibition by New York City sound artist Jody Elff. His sound and video installation, titled, Three Windows, offers the viewer an immersive, dynamic listening and viewing experience. Using a variety of audio and video technology, he creates a unique, reactive environment. As visitors walk through the gallery, the installation transforms around them, shifting their attention around the space.
Because the behavior of the work is unpredictable
and none of the resulting sonic combinations are pre-recorded,
the art itself will evolve as the show progresses. By merely being
present, visitors will contribute to the evolution of the piece.
"One of my most important criteria is that the work is fresh,
no matter how many times someone might see it," Elff says.
"My works operate by means of custom software which follows
certain rules and variables to combine sonic and visual elements
in ways that are unpredictable, yet subject to carefully crafted
restrictions and limits. While the piece will always be recognizable,
one can never predict precisely how it might behave at any given
viewing. When revisiting my installations, I frequently find myself
being surprised by them, even though they are always behaving
the way I intended them to."
For viewers, Elff says this means they never get to a point where they can "predict" the next moment of the piece - it's always changing, keeping the eye and ear engaged. "I aspire toward offering the same kind of experience we have when moving through the natural world," he says. "Do we ever get tired of looking at the sky? No, because we never know exactly what we might see when we look up, even though we know what we're likely to see."
As a student at Berklee College of Music, Elff focused on electronic music and the use of computer systems for music and sound manipulation. Since then, he has served as audio engineer for countless concert presentations and numerous recordings, as well as live music events for cable and network television and TV talk shows. His work has taken him around the world with artists as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Diana Krall, and Lou Reed. He is the resident sound designer for the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA) and, as a result of his work with that company won an Obie Award for Design in 2006.
Elff will give a gallery talk on Nov, 16, 2007, from 7-7:30pm.
The art of painter Lori Esposito combines streaks, drips, and blossoming areas of pure hue to create the exciting visual effect of layered color. Many of Esposito's works are primarily abstract, while others offer the more literal visuals of plants, landscapes, and other objects. Either way, her art always gives a strong sense of that which is ethereal, dream-like, and intensely beautiful.
In many of Esposito's works, leaves, petals, blossoms, and other plant iconography float across the surface. The garden iconography holds value as an indication of both the artist's process and how she hopes her art will be experienced. To the artist, painting is like a form of aesthetic landscaping - she is interested in how the construction of a garden mirrors her creative acts and thoughts. The multiple elements and various focal points of a real garden move the gaze around the space, drawing the eye away from a linear motion of sight. Rather than walking a straight visual path, viewers become happily lost in the imagery of floating dandelions and dancing leaves in Esposito's paintings. In this way, she creates "gardens of meaning" in which the viewer's mind can wander.
The gardens of meaning also serve as a conceptual entryway into the painting's atmosphere. Plants and flowers are common motifs, and this familiarity projects a semblance of the mundane. However, a visual stroll through one of Esposito's aesthetic landscapes is anything but ordinary. Drawn in initially by the familiar floral imagery, the viewer soon discovers hidden narratives and dream-like worlds. Her paintings can be described as sacred, poetic places that lie dormant, awaiting activation by the viewer who discovers hidden meanings through the creation of his or her own narrative. These paintings provide the viewer with more than the regal and beautiful simplicity of a traditional landscape. Instead, they offer traces of the visible with which to step into an imaginative aesthetic landscape and thus enter the world of Lori Esposito.
After earning her Bachelor's of Fine Arts from Rocky Mountain School of Art in 1999, Esposito went on to earn a Master's of Art from the Ohio University School of Art in 2004. She has held exhibitions in New York, Washington, DC, Ohio, and Florida, including a solo show at Irvine Contemporary of Washington, DC. She is currently represented by Irvine Contemporary.
Esposito will present an artist lecture at the Waterworks on Nov. 29, 2007, from 7-8 pm.
Xiaoze Xie
All forms of documentation are temporary to some degree. Chinese artist Xiaoze Xie explores the transience of literary documentation in his striking photorealistic paintings and prints. In his works, the exposed edges and spines of piles of old newspapers and library books reveal snippets of intriguing visual information. A painting may offer a fragmented view of a week's worth of front page news stories or a lonely pile of water damaged old books. Either way, Xie's visual representations of various reading materials allow the viewer to contemplate the relationship between self, culture, and what we read.
In Disposable Views, Xie's many paintings of newspaper stacks on library shelves address both the temporal reality of this form of literature and the larger social picture of the world. A newspaper is a veritable gold mine of information describing the trials, tribulations, celebrations, and other events of daily life. Although the paper serves an important role in educating and informing, each individual paper is a mundane and temporary object, inevitably replaced by the next morning's updated edition. The old paper is thrown out and recycled, perhaps to be turned into new newspapers. In addition to exploring the transient nature of this cultural tool, Xie's stacks make interesting statements about the world in which we live. No conscious effort is made by the artist to present specific and meaningful arrangements of text and image; this random juxtaposition both suggests and conceals a larger, more complex social picture.
Other works by Xie explore rows and stacks of books slumbering on library shelves. The artist sees books as a concrete form of abstract ideologies. From banning, destroying, gilding, or worshipping as religious truth, the different ways people treat books determine a large part of cultural history. Xie's past installation pieces, such as Nocturne: Burning of Books by the Nazis (1995), examine historical documentation while resonating on political and philosophical levels. More recent works document burnt and water-damaged books from the collection of a university library in Beijing, whose collection was damaged during its relocation to avoid the Japanese invasion of the 1930s-40s. These somber paintings suggest that as much as books affect history, history affects books. Xie's art helps us all to ponder how history can affect the pages we write in the book of life.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture from Tsinghua University of Beijing, China, in 1988, Xiaoze Xie earned two Masters of Fine Arts degrees from the Central Academy of Arts and Design (1991) and the University of North Texas (1996). In 2003, he was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Xie has held numerous one-person and group shows in China, Canada, Texas, and New York. The artist currently serves as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the Center at 704/636-1882 or visit (www.waterworks.org).
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