Special Projects Program, Winter 2000

November 19, 2000 – Janurary 31, 2001

(November 18, 2000) – Open November 19, 2000, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents two new Special Projects, one by Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, and one by Michael Rakowitz. Continuing Special Projects include works by Haluk Akakçe and Marc Lester Yu. As a new addition to P.S.1’s Vertical Paintings series, Arturo Herrera presents a new painting on the ceiling in one of P.S.1’s stairwells. Video works by Susan Black, Shane Hassett, and John Pilson are also newly installed at P.S.1.

The P.S.1 Special Projects Program showcases the work of artists distinguished by the site-specific, process-oriented or audience-interactive nature of their work. Each year, 12 artists have the opportunity to develop and present a newly created project. Throughout the program period, artists work with their studio doors open to the public, allowing for an opportunity of exchange between artist and audience. As a new aspect of the Special Projects Program, writers are welcomed to contribute their responses to the work. Selected submissions are published on P.S.1’s website (www.ps1.org) and are made available to visitors on site.

Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, United States) and Andrea Geyer (b. 1971, Freiburg, Germany)
Sharon Hayes  and Andrea Geyer  present "Cambio de Lugar_Change of Place," a multi-channel video installation. Focusing on issues of translation and untranslatability, this project consists of a series of interviews with women in Mexico City on the topic of gender and feminism. By having only the translator appear on the screen, the experience of negotiating terminology and interpretation is foregrounded. First presented at the Mexico City alternative space La Panaderia in summer 2000, this project will continue at P.S.1 with a new series of bilingual interviews. Visit web component.
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Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, United States)
Michael Rakowitz explores the dynamic relationship between the museum and the viewer in a new interactive installation, "Climate Control." The project features an intricate climate control system set to regulate ventilation, temperature, and moisture according to institutional standards. The project, with its circuitous mechanical design and machinery, visually animates the precarious calibration between the system and the individual. Rakowitz is interested in environmental issues and public interventions. In an on-going project titled "paraSITE," begun in 1999, the artist produces individual clear plastic shelters for the homeless which are inflated and ‘climatized’ by attaching them to out-take ducts in the ventilation systems of buildings.
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Haluk Akakçe (b. 1970, Ankara, Turkey)
Artist Haluk Akakçe outlines the dramas of human interaction in both his video installation, "Measure of All Things," (2000) and a wall drawing trilogy. The video, located on the first floor, is made up of a cycle of scenes that describe the human desire for freedom and the (perverse) solution generated with the birth of information technology. It contrasts our current idea of paradise, i.e., a technological simulation, with a view of a "historical," or mythical and religious paradise. Similarly, Akakçe’s wall drawing (on the second floor) is a staging of a room transformed by a dialogue between two images. This third and final stage of the artist's wall installation is entitled "8 Minutes Deep, 1 Life Away."
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Marc Lester Yu (b. 1979, Manila, The Philippines)
Marc Lester Yu creates performance-based installations in which he manifests personal memory through materiality, using vinyl as a suggestion of anonymous skin. Yu believes that when people engage and interact physically in his work a metaphorical shift occurs, allowing for political, social, and mental change. For P.S.1, Yu coaches the audience in a hybrid game of dodge-ball. In one room, the artist and the audience wear special constrictive clothing making it difficult to avoid the ball; in the other room, visitors cheer and jeer as if in a stadium setting. Due to the nature of the clothing the players’ movement is restricted and brining to light the contradictions of childhood games and their resulting psychic and emotional states.
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Susan Black (b. 1964, United States)
Susan Black’s videos depict landscapes minimally re-edited to incorporate personal experience and impressions. Sometimes, the artist turns an image upside-down, re-mixes music to compose a soundtrack, or manipulates color. In "Heaven on Earth," she highlights the flawlessly landscaped neighborhood of the California retiree, with its perfect gardens and gravel paths neatly turned upside-down. Black’s work is currently featured in the 7th Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba (2000).

Shane Hassett (b. 1964, United States)
Shane Hassett’s video work, drawings, and paintings point to an interest in the architecture that has arisen alongside urban economic development and redevelopment. Depicting buildings as ruins, vacant facades, or impenetrable and corporate, without character or individuality, Hassett explores our attempts at a relationship with this architecture. "Running" (1998) shows a man in a business suit repeatedly running towards an office building. The video cuts to a new scene just before he reaches the entrance. The infinite loop of interrupted attempts at entering the building "parodies the desires of constant speculative development."

John Pilson (b. 1968, United States)
John Pilson introduces his most recent video installation, "Above the Grid" in P.S.1’s café.  As with his earlier "Interregna," (2000) which premiered at P.S.1 in Greater New York this past spring, Pilson explores how life rushes into the corporate environment. "Above the Grid" is a two-channel video installation in which vignettes of absurd acts and events occur. The title refers to Manhattan’s gridded street plan as well as to Modernist architecture and its legacy in Minimalism. In this "controlled" environment, men in business suits sing doo-wop songs in the corridors, elevators and bathrooms of a corporate office tower.

Arturo Herrera (b. 1959, Caracas, Venezuela)
P.S.1 presents Party for Tom a long-term wall-painting by Arturo Herrera. This work, located in stairwell A at the 3^rd floor, is the latest addition to the Vertical Paintings series initiated with P.S.1’s reopening in 1997. Herrera’s wall paintings, made up of solid colors and clean, curved lines, evoke memories of cartoon imagery while never entirely revealing their source in the artist’s or the viewer’s visual memory.

P.S.1’s Special Projects Program is made possible in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Mark Lester Yu’s participation is made possible by the Jerome Foundation. Thierry Fontaine is sponsored in part by L’AFAA.