Kris Martin. “Idiot” (2004—5). Ink on paper, 1494 pages. (Courtesy of Artist & Sies + Höke gallery)
“You can't get there from here but you can get here from there”
Curated by Courtenay Finn
September 15 — October 30, 2010
Featuring art by: Sophie Calle, Patty Chang, Rodney Graham, Joachim Koester, Kris Martin, Bruce Nauman, and Allen Ruppersberg
A winner of the 2010-2011 Unsolicited Proposal Program, You can't get there from here but you can get here from there (YCGTFH), curated by Courtenay Finn, opens on Wednesday, September 15 from 6-8pm.
Investigating the relationship between written language and physical behavior, YCGTFH includes work by seven artists, including Bruce Nauman's sixty-minute video “Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk),” which shows the artist being influenced by the behavior of Watt, Samuel Beckett's protagonist. Nauman renders his reading into action using his physical body to gain insight into the text.
In “From the Travel of Jonathan Harker,” Joachim Koester follows the trail of the protagonist in Bram Stoker's Dracula, comparing the Transylvania of Stoker's imagination with the reality of suburban sprawl and illegal logging. Patty Chang's video “Shangri-La” investigates the mythical location of James Hilton's 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, enabling her to take a real journey to an imaginary place, while Rodney Graham makes his own additions to Ian Fleming's novel Dr. No.
In a different vein Sophie Calle illuminates her intimate relationship with the writer Hervé Guibert, evoking the fusion that can occur between reader and author, between reality and fiction. Allen Ruppersberg's “The Gift and the Inheritance (Les Fleurs du Mal)” explores his own role as a reader and the importance of his library, and Kris Martin's Endpoint series poses the question: how does our role as the reader continue when the literary text comes to the end?
YCGTFH offers an insight into the complex relationship readers have with the texts they inhabit, invoking a place where narratives become real.
On view through October 30 at apexart.
Click here for more information.
apexart, 291 church street, new york, ny 10013
(212) 431-5270, www.apexart.org
apexart is a non-profit arts organization in Lower Manhattan that was conceived to offer opportunities to independent curators and emerging and established artists, as well as to challenge ideas about art, its practice and curation. We realize this mission through exhibitions, an international residency, a book publishing initiative, and public programs and events.
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