Of the many renovations completed in our Dallas office earlier this year, one of the best additions– the gallery space– has yet to be used. Lucky for us, art director Nikki Koenig is continuing her creative culture project with an exhibition by Dallas artist Rebecca Carter. This installation marks the second art exhibition at TMA following last year’s installation by artist Willie Baronet.
Rebecca’s work will be exhibited from the first of August until the 26th. Her exhibition includes a series of prints, two interactive installations, and a temporary video installation that will only be showing this week. Come see Rebecca’s work, and come Thursday August 4th for the opening reception where Rebecca will speak about her work and participate in a Q&A session.
My Own Backyard
My Own Backyard is a series of video stills from a video shot with the cat cam. The project began with the fantasy of seeing the world through my cats’ eyes as they roamed the Chicago alleys at night. I created a specially designed Lycra suit to hold a tiny wireless video camera on top of their heads. Of course, the observer impacts the observed, and once suited, the cats barely move, refuse to leave the backyard, and ultimately shake their heads free. In the resulting footage, I am fascinated by moments, less than a fraction of a second and visible only as still frames where digital glitches in the transmission of data between the various elements of the apparatus yield images that look like surveillance of outer space. In this work my back yard then gains the potential of being a portal to galaxies beyond, or simultaneously, a magical technicolor dream world somewhat like Oz.
Drawing Machine Drawing
The Drawing Machine project comes from an investigation of things that make themselves, sculptural objects that perform in time to create artifacts, evidence of their performance. These “things that make themselves” are a response to more labor intensive aspects of my studio practice in particular the groundless thread drawings. The Drawing Machine is a simple china silk sail that hangs by monofilament from a thin frame of wooden dowels. The sail catches wind currents in the space moving a permanent marker across a large sheet of drawing paper stretched onto the floor of the space. The resulting marks build over time until the pen runs out of ink to create dense galaxy like configurations. Long thin lines form when the pen moves quickly and contrast with pools of seeping ink when the pen stands still. All aspects of movement and stillness are recorded and are essential to creating the final work.
No Place Like Home
In No Place Like Home, I’ve altered and extended the less than 2 second clip in the Wizard of Oz where under Glenda the good witch’s command, Dorothy clicks her ruby red heeled slippers three times to instigate the mantra: there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home that transports her back to her bed in Kansas. Frame by frame the clip was exported as a series of stills. I erased the backgrounds leaving only the feet and legs and the bottom of the dress in a black field. The new frames then are the building block of a new animation more slow than the original. The sequence loops back and forth, never arriving at the moment of transformation. Presented as a mirrored projection, a smaller blurrier version of the video moves on a mirror placed low to the ground. The mirror throws the projection across the space where the image high on the wall is in focus, larger than life.
ArtTalk is part of TMA’s Step to Greatness initiative – the program’s goal is to inspire, educate and elevate the agency by bringing in local multimedia/new media artists to share their work in a solo exhibition.
