I Wasn't Just Saying
What You Wanted To Hear
Video & Sound Artworks from Katherine Behar, Constance DeJong, Ellie Krakow, Jaeeun Lee and Elise Rasmussen
Curated by Molly Mac
Open Saturdays and for Special Events, March 5- April 9, 2016
Project Diana: Natasha Marin (opens March 12)
Writer in Residence: Anastacia Renee (as Alice)
What You Wanted To Hear
Video & Sound Artworks from Katherine Behar, Constance DeJong, Ellie Krakow, Jaeeun Lee and Elise Rasmussen
Curated by Molly Mac
Open Saturdays and for Special Events, March 5- April 9, 2016
Project Diana: Natasha Marin (opens March 12)
Writer in Residence: Anastacia Renee (as Alice)
I Wasn’t Just Saying What You Wanted To Hear... is an immersive video and sound exhibition that stages a conversation between five single-channel video artworks by five different artists.
Each of the five screen-based works invents and occupies a charged psychological universe and its own distinctly metered sense of time. By presenting these works simultaneously in a one-room exhibition, this show creates a unique opportunity to tease additional interpretations, contexts and contingencies out of already resolved narrative forms.
A sustained cacophony creates a critical pause. This pause puts a viewer on the spot:
“As I approached, they suddenly became silent and glared at me. They let me walk into the circle. I looked around, but nobody spoke.” (Jaeeun Lee)
... and then they do speak. Narrative authority is a midnight grammar game is the ethos of modern painting (revisited) is the bloat of technocapitalism is a message from a ghost is a willfully perverted secret is the science for lighting a romance film. Egos flare, rhetoric unravels, protagonists emerge and recede. The personal corrupts the political and the political corrupts the personal; “and no, I promise your hair is not receding.” (Constance DeJong)
This conversation won’t resolve the conceptual problems it raises or the politics it complicates.
I Wasn’t Just Saying What You Wanted To Hear... is an immersive video and sound exhibition that stages a conversation between five single-channel video artworks by five different artists.
Each of the five screen-based works invents and occupies a charged psychological universe and its own distinctly metered sense of time. By presenting these works simultaneously in a one-room exhibition, this show creates a unique opportunity to tease additional interpretations, contexts and contingencies out of already resolved narrative forms.
A sustained cacophony creates a critical pause. This pause puts a viewer on the spot:
“As I approached, they suddenly became silent and glared at me. They let me walk into the circle. I looked around, but nobody spoke.” (Jaeeun Lee)
... and then they do speak. Narrative authority is a midnight grammar game is the ethos of modern painting (revisited) is the bloat of technocapitalism is a message from a ghost is a willfully perverted secret is the science for lighting a romance film. Egos flare, rhetoric unravels, protagonists emerge and recede. The personal corrupts the political and the political corrupts the personal; “and no, I promise your hair is not receding.” (Constance DeJong)
This conversation won’t resolve the conceptual problems it raises or the politics it complicates.
Artist Bios:
Katherine Behar is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work includes performance, interactive installation, video, and writing about digital culture. Behar's work appears at festivals, galleries, performance spaces, and art centers worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Judson Church in New York; UNOACTU in Dresden; The Girls Club Collection in Miami; Feldman Gallery + Project Space in Portland; De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam; the Mediations Biennale in Poznan; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Swiss Institute in Rome; the National Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca; and many others. She is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Art Journal and the Rubin Museum of Art; and grants including the Franklin Furnace Fund, the U.S. Consulate in Leipzig, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Cleveland Performance Art Festival. Her ongoing projects include two collaborations, the performance art group Disorientalism, with Marianne M. Kim, and the art and technology team Resynplement, with Ben Chang and Silvia Ruzanka. Behar's writings on technology and culture have been published in Lateral, Media-N, Parsons Journal for Information Mapping, Visual Communication Quarterly, and EXTENSIONS: The Online Journal for Embodied Technology. She is Assistant Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College.
Constance DeJong has been making and touring spoken word performances of her prose, adapting the texts for live presentation since 1979. Audio and video have been elements of the performance work since the beginning. In May 2013 – she presented SpeakChamber, a duet between DeJong and an iMac, at Bureau Gallery, NYC. The material is also a print book, an edition of digital frame works, three graphic prints and a “chamber d’amis” performance in private residences that implicates SpeakChamber’s fictive interiors and cast of domestic objects. She has twice collaborated with Tony Oursler on live performances – 1985 (produced by the ICA Boston) and 2000 (produced by Dia Center for the Arts). And she was a collaborator on “Super Vision,” A Builders Association production (2005); librettist for the opera, “Satyagraha,“composer Philip Glass. She is currently a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College.
Ellie Krakow is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in New York. She earned her MFA from Hunter College and her BA through study at Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her exhibitions include solo projects at The Skowhegan NYC Space, Thomas Hunter Project Space, and Cuchifritos Gallery. Her work has been included in group shows at venues including the Kingston Sculpture Biennial, Hal Bromm Gallery, Thierry Goldberg, Interstate Projects, and Canada Gallery, all in New York; as well as at The Pula Film Festival in Croatia, Organhaus Art Space in China and MMX Open Art in Berlin. Her text-based projects have been published in VECTOR Artists Journal and Drain Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture. She is a recipient of a Boomerang Fund for Artists Grant and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and Abrons Arts Center. She is a current resident artist in the Hunter College Ceramics Department.
Jaeeun Lee was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. She received an MFA in combined media from Hunter College, NY in 2011 and a BFA in sculpture from Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, Korea in 2006. She was also a resident artist in Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in ME in 2011. She has participated in a number of shows in various venues such as La MaMa La Galleria, Present Company, Lesley Heller Workspace, Regina Rex, CUNY Graduate Center, all in NY. Her work has been mentioned in NY Times, Artnet, Hyperallergic, NYArts Magazine and NY Observer, among others.
Elise Rasmussen is a NY-based artist whose research-based practice incorporates photography, video, performance and installation. She is represented by ESP (Erin Stump Projects) in Toronto and her work has been exhibited, performed and screened at international venues including the Brooklyn Museum, Bard CCS Hessel Museum (Annandale-on-Hudson), Pioneer Works (NY), Night Gallery (LA), The Chicago Cultural Center, TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, Galerie Articule (Montreal), Werkschauhalle (Leipzig), Standpoint Gallery (London), and most recently at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin where she was a recent artist in residence. Elise received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a Merit Scholarship and her BFA with Honors from the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has been written about in publications such as Art in America, The New Inquiryand BOMB Magazine, and she has lectured at a number of institutions including Parsons The New School, SVA, SUNY Westchester, OCAD University (Toronto), IADT (Dublin), and Kuvataideakatemia (Helsinki). Elise is a 2016 Fellow of the Art and Law Program in New York and has upcoming exhibitions at ESP, the Harbourfront Centre (Toronto) and Dazibao (Montreal).