bitforms gallery

ANDREW NEUMANN
INDUSTRIAL WALL PANELS
SHOW DATES: 1 16 03 – 2 22 03 OPENING RECEPTION: 1 18 03, 6-8PM
Andrew Neumann is a Boston-based artist who works with electronic media in a variety of different permutations; sculpture, electronic music, film and video installation. Born in New York, raised in New Jersey, he received a B.S. from Emerson College in filmmaking, and taught in the film department of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts through the 90’s. Last year, he had an exhibit at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass, and will be having a solo show of computer-based video installations at BostonCyberarts 2003. His music has been performed around
the Northeast and New York City, and is distributed through Sublingual Records. He was an Artist in Residence at the iEar Studio at Rensselaer Polytech Institute in 2001, and has had residences at McDowell Colony, Yaddo, Art Omi, STEIM, and the Ucross Foundation. His single channel videos have been screened at the World Wide Video Festival in The Hague, PBS, ArtistSpace and elsewhere.

“Industrial Wall Panels” refers to re-defining the notion of “industry”. In the past, the word conjured of images of masses of steel, huge electric motors, steam, heat and density; Images represented so clearly, for example, in Chaplin’s “Modern Times”, and Keatons “The Electric House”. Now that we have evolved into the “digital age”, these “Panels” may already be viewed as relics of a recently passed generation. In addition, these works are about exploring the electronic image in a self representational fashion. No video tape or digital image buffers are used. Cameras embedded within the pieces defining the process that is actually occurring. These works serve as exoskeletons; stripping away any outer shell to explore the beauty of the “industrial” elements themselves.

As a practitioner of avant-garde film methods and ideologies, another main interest of Neumann has been about observing/manipulating/dissecting the “cinematic apparatus”, the camera and projector. Past works have included multiple projections, “two-sided films”, loops, etc. In the electronic media, the connection is defined in a different mode; it is (potentially) immediate and spontaneous. Although the camera and monitor/projector are the basic mediators of the image, a great deal of electronic manipulation can occur with ease and immediacy. With the wall panels that incorporate cameras and monitors, the idea was to allow the “apparatus” to be evident to the observer, and allow for any optical (mis)perceptions to be integral to the work itself.

By deconstructing these technologies, and reorganizing them in to new formal “Panels”, Neumann is questioning the value of the objects, disregarding any protocol, (which is at the heart of any machine-based technological system) and exploring the relationship between technology and the world it is meant to serve. In essence, these “Panels” are meditations on technology and specifically it’s role in shaping how electronic media is repressed/represented.