leewells.org - painting, video art, new media and other fun stuff dealing with contemporary art and culture

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Jennifer Jacobs
www.jenniferj.net

Sister City, 2007
4 channel digital animation

Sister City defines an individual’s identity and internal evolution using a pair of narratives as a reference point. The narratives are set in two different worlds located in opposing universes. Both worlds contain two cities and a pair of sisters. These separate worlds are different representations of the same mind, parallel to the conscious and unconscious realms of the human brain. The cities symbolize two divergent personas within this mind and the sisters serve as vectors of interaction between them. This structure reveals a continuous process of mental division and conflict, representative of the psychological evolution that occurs throughout a lifetime.

Jennifer Jacobs is an emerging artist from Corvallis, Oregon and a recent graduate of the University of Oregon. Her work addresses the personal metamorphosis that results from our identification and daily interaction with the mechanical. Her pieces range from live productions to animation with interactive elements. She currently works and resides in New York City.

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Eric Payson
www.ericpayson.com

Ghostplay, 2007
Photo Duraclear installation

In Payson’s electrifying new work Ghostplay, college football’s raw beauty rises to the surface in photographs taken directly from the television screen; images morph into each other and expressions are magnified as they are frozen in time. Ghostplay examines the media that transmits it all, as the broadcasters and corporate sponsors appear as much a part of the game as the athletes and coaches. Interspersed with intrusive news bulletins, overeager cheerleaders, anxious spectators, and seemingly malicious data on the athletes’ injuries, college football appears to be a forum for adolescent violence and pervasive adult greed. In these images, the game dissolves as the ghost in the machine of the American media is captured by Payson’s camera. Ghostplay reveals the suspicion and intrigue lurking between the stadium seats, played out in the television control rooms, and hovering in the lower levels of our consciousness.

Eric Payson is a photographer and performance artist. Solo exhibitions of his photographs have been mounted at Galerie Bodo Niemann, Berlin and Rene Fotouhi, East Hampton, New York. Payson lives and works in New York and Tucson, Arizona.

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Mark Tribe
www.nothing.org

The Port Huron Project, 2007
Digital Video

The Port Huron Project is a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the 1960s and ‘70s. Each event takes place at the site of the original speech, and is delivered by an actor to an audience of invited guests and passers-by. Videos of these performances are presented in various venues and distributed online (on YouTube, Blip.tv, and MySpace) and on DVD as open-source media (so others can view them, share them, or use them as found footage in other projects). The videos included in this exhibition document reenactments, staged in 2006 and 2007, of speeches originally given by Coretta Scott King (Central Park, 1968), author/activist Howard Zinn (Boston Common, 1971) and SDS President Paul Potter (National Mall, 1965).

Mark Tribe is an artist and curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. His art work has been exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, and Gigantic Art Space in New York City. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. In 1996, he founded Rhizome.org, an online resource for new media artists. He teaches at Brown University, and is the co-author, with Reena Jana, of New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). He splits his time between Providence and New York City.

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[dNASAb]
www.tc43.com

data ECOsystems .HybridEnertainmentMatrix, 2007
multi channel iPod video sculpture

[dNASAb]’s data ECOsystems explore the possible aesthetics of wireless data and critique the fetishization of technology through photography, drawing, painting, and assemblage sculpture. Informed by the integration of art installation, sound, and technology, [dNASAb]’s work is richly intricate and visually stunning, each piece suggesting a “visual network” formed from explosions of mass communication graffiti.

[dNASAb] received a BFA in Sculpture and in Mixed Media from Florida State University in 1994. He was selected by Cindy Sherman, Jack Pierson, and Adam Fuss for Unframed First Look 2004, a juried salon for emerging artists at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. In March 2005, the artist was a winner in The Los Angeles Center For Digital Art’s international competition for photography and digital artists. He has exhibited and has collaborated extensively in new media art installations, interactive multimedia projects, and art performances in New York and internationally since 1997. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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About the curator

Lee Wells is an artist, exhibition organizer and consultant currently living and working New York. Curating since 1996, his projects have recently been included in the 2nd Moscow Biennale, Chelsea Art Museum and Art Basel Miami Beach 2006. He is a co-founder of [PAM] the Perpetual Art Machine (www.perpetualartmachine.com) an online community video art portal and traveling interactive installation founded in January 2006.

As an artist his work, which addresses systems of power and control, has been presented in a number of solo and group exhibitions including the 51 st La Biennale Di Venezia, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinatti, the Museo d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART) and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. His projects and exhibitions have been written about by various national and international art and news publications to include: The New York Times, Art Newspaper, The Washington Post, Art in America, and Art Net.

Wells most recently was invited to curate an international program for “In Transition Russia 2008” a project in collaboration with the National Centres of Contemporary Art (NCCA), Yekaterinburg and Moscow, The Academy of Contemporary Art, The Ural State Gorky University (USU), Yekaterinburg and the Independent Museum of Contemporary Art (IMCA) in Limassol, Cyprus.