Michelle Hines / Bartow+Metzgar

For the past decade, Michelle Hines has been exploring the variable textures of private obsessions made public, anonymity vs. the rabid desire for fame, recognition and acceptance, and the absurd manifestations of these desires. Within the Contest of No Contest will include photo-based works and videos from the past ten years, culminating in her most recent Through Binoculars series of images.

Previous works by Hines will represent three distinct series produced over the past ten years: World Record Attempts, the Supernatural series, and the Celebrity/Anonymity series. Among the world record attempts on display will be the Largest Ear of Corn and the infamous Peristaltic Action, the latter included in John Waters' Art: A Sex Book and enjoying an extended life on web blogs. Where the World Record Attempts underscore the sometimes-absurd yearning for fame, Hines' Supernatural series explores a different tangent of notoriety, similarly rooted in a singular sense of belief. Hines' crop circle imagery and Yeti video are astute recreations of those unknowable (and quite possibly fake) icons that fuel our internal desire to connect ourselves with the exotic and elusive. This same sentiment is evident in the video Celebrity Impressions, in which one man moves through innumerable celebrity impressions, as though this mildly useful skill provided a mantra to deeper meaning.

Hines' more recent Through Binoculars series features surreptitious images of pedestrians, photographed from a great height and through both a binocular and telephoto lens. The formal distance of this method creates an otherworldly distance appropriate to the subject. Formally, pavement, color, and light play to create unique pictorial depictions that occasionally verge on abstraction. The abject loneliness and singularity of many of the Through Binoculars images serve to underscore a sentiment that runs beneath much of the work that preceded it. It is as though we are all perpetually wafting between anonymity and the alluring promise contained in even the most ridiculous versions of fame.

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BARTOW+METZGAR: Corrupture

The projects undertaken by Bartow+Metzgar are arenas within which space is both created and disrupted. Theirs is a pointed exploration of “things in the world” and the the implications of rethinking things and structures as active agents. Using a simple set of algorithms or directives derived from certain known facts (size and shape of the gallery, its lighting track configuration, etc), B+M create an exploding assemblage whose unfolding growth highlights disparate and unexpected connections and relationships between objects and images. Elements of the urban environment (sound, signage, architecture) are reconfigured as the links and hybrids that invent new forms.

There is a wildly exploratory aspect to the practice of Bartow+Metzgar, one in which concrete objects and images nonetheless take on entirely malleable form as they are manifest within a context that relies on (and relishes) rethinking space as an unfolding potentiality. B+M are continually re-examining one’s embodiment with the everyday, in that bodily perceptions are continually assaulted with a multiplicity of sensorial stimuli. All of these factors become opportunities for the investigation of potential mediators within the open Bartow+Metzgar equation. To them, there is no such thing as too much. More mediators equal more experiences of the world.

The painted, printed, and video images used as samples of the everyday Corrupture were culled from urban environments including Tapei, Montreal, Rochester, Vancouver, and New York City. It should be a telling detail that these two sculptors collaborate as a single entity separated only by a “+” sign. Their installation projects are distinct versions of “+”. The manner in which elements are added is never repeated, but the underlying sense of perpetual aggregation persists.

www.oswego.edu/~metzgar www.spurse.org

Pressetext

Michelle Hines: Within the Contest of No Contest
Bartow+Metzgar: Corrupture