17th
Annual Student Awards Exhibition
February 26 -March 10, 2002
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Close Listening: sound, art,
science and the imagination
Curated by Stephanie Rowden
For complete
information on this exhibition, go to
http://www.art-design.umich.edu/exhibits/closelistening.html
November 17 – December 16, 2001
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Close
Listening explores the way sound resonates in the imagination and
opens up an understanding of the larger world around us. The exhibition
features several audio installations and objects in addition to sound
gathered from a wide range of disciplines where listening is a vehicle
for inquiry or expression, including: poetry, astronomy, medical science,
ethnomusicology, radio, performance art, engineering, zoology, anthropology
and music. Key to the show’s concept is the unique character of sound
– the way in which experiences of listening not only touch interior
dimensions of memory and emotion but also move us outward, beyond the
borders of home, toward an awareness of the world not visible from where
we sit.
Curated by sound artist Stephanie Rowden, Close Listening includes
several installations and sculpture works that draw on the expressive
dimension of sound. Heather Nicol’s exuberant sculptural light fixtures
are fabricated from party dresses and interwoven with a seductive audio
collage of female voice. Elke Lehmann’s humorous stuffed macaw simulates
the sound it “hears.” Frank Pahl’s yard sale assemblages
create an ambient music from vintage zithers, air organs and ukuleles.
Anne Kirby Rubin’s bas-relief is an evocative translation of a nocturnal
soundscape in nature. Shawn Decker’s installation surrounds listeners
with a subtle, continuous music created by the delicate clicking sounds
of sixteen paint stirrers in motion. Alan Berliner’s “Aviary”
consists of twenty-seven file drawers each with different bird sounds
-- allowing the visitor to compose a concrete music rooted in abstract
natural language.
The show also includes six “listening tables” with a wide range
of sounds assembled by curator Stephanie Rowden. These audio segments
from over twenty artists and researchers range from exquisite field recordings
and interviews with the people who made them to poetry, performance art
monologues, audio essays, sounds collected for scientific research, and
everyday sound reconfigured into music. Rowden has collected a series
of “listening excursions -- from neutron star pulsars to the pulse
of the human heart, from a remote village in Indonesia to the Bowery in
New York City, from sound as a conveyer of story to sound as a map to
places unknown.
These various experiences of sound suggest an array of questions: How
does sound awaken the imagination? What knowledge is uniquely gained by
listening? What effect does listening have on our understanding of ourselves
and of the larger world? Moving across many disciplines, the Close
Listening exhibition explores these questions and celebrates the richness
of sound as an expressive medium.
Artists in the exhibition:
Elke Lehmann (New York City, NY)
Alan Berliner (New York City, NY)
Shawn Decker (Chicago, IL)
Heather Nicol (New York City, NY)
Frank Pahl (Detroit, MI)
Anne Kirby Rubin (Ann Arbor, MI)
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Frank
Pahl
Virtual Conductor |
Heather
Nicol
Psst! 2000 Fabric hardened with urethane Changing sound and light 
sound excerpt
from installation |
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Alan Berliner |
Elke
Lehmann
Back Talk Mounted Macaw, interactive, speaking mechanism, microphone, speaker, aluminum |
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Anne
Rubin
Florida Frog Song II 1998 |
Everything Can Be Different
September
11 – November 4, 2001
Guest
Curator: Maria Lind
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The University of Michigan School of Art & Design, Jean Paul Slusser
Gallery will be the opening venue for the national touring exhibition,
Everything Can Be Different, curated by Maria Lind, from the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. Everything Can Be Different presents
a new trend in contemporary art practice, emphasizing optimism and experimentation.
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The artists in this exhibition invest in personal relationships as a means
of addressing art and society, and explore possibilities rather than difficulties,
generating works that are intended to delight and surprise the viewer.
Art is used here to create something new out of social situations and
settings, encouraging us to believe that everything can, indeed, be different.
While sidestepping two classic approaches—abstract art without political
perspective, and work that wrestles explicitly with the economic and political
forces of capitalist society—the artists in Everything Can Be
Different advance a new approach. With sensitivity for small or banal
moments in life, they propose modest alternatives to the norm. When utopias
are present, they are in the form of micro-utopias, small and local, for
the here and now.
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Everything Can Be Different brings together well-known and emerging
American and European artists who in their work allow the process to shape
the result. Artists may devise interactive structures, or they may reroute
expectations by reorganizing existing materials.
For instance, Anna Gaskell sets up a parallel story to Alice in Wonderland,
while Cartsen Holler, with his collection of new games, provides insights
into not-yet-imagined forms of play. Elin Wikstrôm experiments in
trust when she invites several women to meet one-on-one with a woman of
whom they have no prior knowledge.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color publication.
Artists in the exhibition:
.....Emese Benczúr (Budapest)
.....Olafur Eliasson (Copenhagen/Berlin)
.....Annika Eriksson (Stockholm)
.....Anna Gaskell (New York)
.....Liam Gillick (London)
.....Carsten Höller (Cologne)
.....Pierre Huyghe (Paris)
.....Koo Jeong-a (Paris/Seoul)
.....Manfred Pernice (Berlin)
.....Superflex (Copenhagen)
.....Apolonija Sustersic (Ljubljana/Amsterdam)
.....Elin Wikstrôm (Göteborg,
Sweden)
.....Andrea Zittel (Pasadena, California)
Everything Can Be Different
is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators
International (ICI), New York. Guest curator is Maria Lind. The exhibition,
tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by a grant from The Foundation-To-Life,
Inc, the Mondriaan Foundation, and the ICI International Associates.
Tender Habitat: Three Works
by Aernout Mik
September 10 – October 22, 2000
Curated by Los Angeles-based artist Anne Walsh,
this is Mik’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Mik, (born
Groningen, Holland, 1962) represented Holland in the 1997 Venice Biennale,
and in January 2000 was the subject of a one-man exhibition at the VanAbbemuseum
in Eindhoven, Netherlands. He is known internationally for installations
which combine architectural constructions and spatial interventions with
live actors and/or silent video projections of people involved in variously
aggressive, passive, pointless, and sometimes solipsistic physical motion.
Concepts of improvisation, regulation, and fragmentation are part of the
"motion of a situation," as Mik describes it, and the desire
to regulate that motion is a consistent and major impulse in his works.
El Caminoville:
A Project by Mike Rogers
October 29 – November 30, 1999
The El Camino project is about obsession, temptation, history, nostalgia,
and the demise of the American dream as seen through the Chevrolet El
Camino. Incorporating photographs, sculpture, and video, the project mixes
fantasy and fact, and features more than 450 photos of El Camino sightings,
a 20-foot scroll illustrating Rogers' theory of its evolution, and designs
for a 1999 El Camino--should it make a comeback.
Playmode
Francis Alys, Lutz Bacher, Stan Douglas, Bia Gayotto, Joseph Grigely,
Evan Holloway, Ana Mendieta
January 8-28, 1999
Curated by Anne Walsh
"Play Mode" is an exhibition which explores the idea that everyday
life is as much "performed" as it is lived spontaneously.
The art works selected for "Play Mode" examine and play with
the intersections, or overlappings of conscious and unconscious actions
and speech. The word "performance" is used in regard to these
works because many of them suggest the possibility that most social interaction
and/or emotional life is "directed," by an internalized "script"
that beings in culture both read, write and perform simultaneously. They
do not disavow spontaneity or subjectivity, but simply describe living
as a process of acting, understood in both its senses of doing and doing
for an audience, even if that audience is ourselves.