Clockwork 2000

P.S.1 National and International Studio Program 1999-2000
May 11-June 17, 2000

Reception: Thursday, May 11, 6-8pm
Clocktower Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, noon–6 p.m.

19 Studio Artists from 14 Countries Celebrate P.S.1’s
Residency Program

(New York, NY, April 18, 2000). P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
announces an exhibition of work by the 1999-2000 P.S.1
National and International Studio Artists, opening at the
Clocktower Gallery, 108 Leonard Street in Manhattan. The
opening will be Thursday, May 11, from 6 to 8 p.m. Clockwork
2000 is curated by Roxana Marcoci, Janice H. Levin Fellow,
Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The
Museum of Modern Art. A catalogue will become available the
second week of June.

P.S.1 takes an open approach to selecting artists for its
National and International Studio Program. A number of artistic
perspectives are represented not only through the global nature
of the program but by encouraging diverse interests, creative
currents, and counterculture. Clockwork 2000 will include video,
mural-scale drawings, performance, sculpture, sound and light
installations, painting, and photography by 19 artists and artist
groups from 14 countries. The exhibition features works about
mass culture as a common language, cultural alienation, the
history of the Clocktower, and fantasies about technology,
virtuality, and rational systems of thought.

1999-2000 National Studio Program Artists included in the
exhibition are: Sanford Biggers, Elke Lehmann, Andrea Ray,
Mary Ellen Strom, Fiona Templeton, and Liz Zawada.

1999-2000 International Studio Program Artists and Artist
Groups included in the exhibition are: Liesbeth Bik and Jos
van der Pol, David Godbold, Kurt Hentschläger, Sabine
Hornig, Seung-Young Kim, Jan Kopp, Susan Macwilliam,
Claudia and Julia Müller, Hironori Murai, Paula Pivi,
Montserrat Soto, Gert Verhoeven, and Sara Chi Hang
Wong.

ARTISTS:

Sanford Biggers (USA) Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva is one in a
series of works dealing with the thin line between the sacred and
the popular. Like the mandala, breakdancing is an art form
based on circular movements depicted on the floor. This project
presents breaking outside of its commercialized context, as a
true urban ritual.

Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol (Netherlands) Bik and van der
Pol have conducted a site-specific, historical investigation of the
Clocktower through the writings of architect Michael Asher,
among other sources. Their stroboscopic lights appear atop the
Clocktower building and on their design of the exhibition
invitation.

David Godbold (Republic of Ireland) America[s] Disclosed 2000 is a large-scale wall painting that depicts the European "discovery" of America as a farce and questions Columbus Day as an appropriate national holiday.

Kurt Hentschläger/Granular Synthesis (Austria) Granular
Synthesis, whose projects are electronically-based, will present
MV1, a large-scale sound and video installation. Granular
Synthesis is currently planning a major installation in June at the
Anchorage, a project created in collaboration with Creative Time.

Sabine Hornig (Germany) Hanging nine feet above the gallery
floor, Sleepcorner is an abstracted little room with a bed. Hornig
reflects on questions of private and public architecture as well as
the local regulations that define them. The artist was surprised
to find tiny living spaces (akin to her earlier work) in New York
apartments.

Seung-Young Kim (Korea )Beyond is a poetic video that reminds
us of the loss of self in a foreign and seemingly vacuous place.
Facing the Atlantic Ocean, Kim sees himself dissolve in the
sand.

Jan Kopp (France) Kopp presents 2 adjacent video pieces. Final
Races is a frantic and funny escape from the P.S.1 studios,
while Alien is a series of uncanny voice-overs in which Kopp
transplants his voice into channel-surfed excerpts from popular
prime-time TV.

Elke Lehmann (USA) Lehmann’s video installation projects
seagulls from the roof of the Cocktower into the gallery. The live
sound of traffic, wind, and birds is fed into the space, as we
watch recorded footage of gulls feeding from Lehmann’s hand,
surrounding the statuary eagles atop the Clocktower.

Susan MacWilliam (Northern Ireland) A brief video work, Faint,
presents images of a fainting woman set against the sound of a
bird’s song. The artist repeatedly enacts the gesture interrupted
by interior shots that function as flashbacks, as though
suggesting a cause. The work addresses broader issues of
psychology and hysteria.

Claudia and Julia Müller (Switzerland) In the video installation
Overtaxed in Front of a Colored Background (Don't believe the
Hype) 3 monitors display the sisters performing mundane
activities gone slightly awry. Bright monochrome backdrops
further suggest decontextualized TV advertisements or bizarre
scientific experiments.

Hironori Murai (Japan) Murai animates puppets with air and
sound. His large-scale black figures are brought to life by
plastic-fan respirators, and speak the recorded dialogues of
families and friends on the subways of New York. Murai’s
puppets at once emanate the life of the city and are dislocated
from it.

Paola Pivi (Italy) The work of Paola Pivi stretches or extends
reality. Her focus is an irrational concentration of elements, such
as light photons, pizza, Chinese people, airplanes, or in this
case, pearls. The superficial system of counting or categorizing
is replaced by a more indefinable element of beauty.

Andrea Ray (USA) Andrea Ray evokes ill-perceived and
misdiagnosed communications between a subject and its
environment. Uneasy moments of passive resistance are seen in
the constant motion of Carrier, a six-minute video by Ray, which
relates travel to the notion of communicable invisible things such
as disease and thought.

Montserrat Soto (Spain) SECRET LANDSCAPE investigates the
environment of contemporary art collectors’ homes. Peeking into
these particular homes, we realize that they are independent
installation pieces, created by the collector's art works. The
works become objets trouvés, transformed by furniture and,
ultimately, by photography.

Mary Ellen Strom (USA )Daughter is a speaking doll which
conveys the tenets of the New York chapter of a historic
women's organization. The sculpture is part of a larger project
examining ways in which the organization attempts to maintain
ideals of patriarchy and "whiteness" as a category, propagating
its specific version of history.

Fiona Templeton (USA) A SPEAKING is a performance of
continuously generated live language. It relates to Templeton’s
recent continuous writing Cells of Release, in which a strip of
words weaves throughout a building. In A SPEAKING, however,
the piece winds back on itself only through the memory of sound
from the artist’s body.

Gert Verhoeven (Belgium) Gert Verhoeven’s installation of
drawings and plaster forms evokes childhood and gaming.
Verhoeven’s work is both Freudian and playful, full of comic
irony.

Sara Chi Hang Wong and Leung Chi Wo (Hong Kong) Wong and
Leung have baked cookies in the shape of extracted pieces of
sky. Shaped by architectural forms, the sky in the vicinity
becomes a puzzle of dough to be eaten by gallery visitors.
Wong and Wo will in turn document visitors’ sky-eating.

Elizabeth Zawada (USA) The painted large-format print Untitled –
paint by number depicts a series of handwritten numbers
meticulously repeated, filling the photograph. Each number has
been assigned a color and hand painted, exposing the inherent
beauty of the arduous writing task.

May 11 Performances:

Professional breakdancers will demonstrate the intended use of
Sanford Biggers’s floor piece.
Fiona Templeton will perfom her continual spoken-word piece,
A SPEAKING.
Sara Wong will distribute sky-shaped cookies to visitors while
supplies last.
Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol will present a site-specific
light piece atop the Clocktower.

THE P.S.1 INTERNATINAL STUDIO PROGRAM COUNCIL:

A.A.V.C. - Associaciò d'Artistes Visuals de Catalunya, Spain
A.F.A.A. - Association Française d'Action Artistique, France
Afdeling Beeldende Kunst en Musea, Belgium
Alitalia Airlines
American Austrian Foundation, New York
Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland
Asian Cultural Council, New York
Austrian Cultural Institute, New York
Austrian Federal Chancellery, Department for the Arts, Austria
Barbara Burgerhout Benazzo
Berlin Senate, Office for Science, Research and the Arts,
Germany
Bulgari
The Consulate General of Italy, New York
The Consulate General of The Netherlands, New York.
The Consulate General of Switzerland, New York
D.A.P. - Delegation aux Arts Plastiques, France
The Federal Office of Culture, Switzerland
Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain
Peter C. Hobart
Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong
Instituto Italiano di Cultura, New York
The Irish American Cultural Institute
Italre Group
The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation
Magazzino d'Arte Moderna
Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap, Belgium
Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Ufficio III
Revista Estilo, Miami
Sony Computer Entertainment Italia, SpA
Sperone Westwater
Stichting Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten, Vormgeving en
Bouwkunst, The Netherlands
Swiss Ministry of Home Affairs, Switzerland
Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York

Additional Support Provided by:

The Chase Manhattan Bank
The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs