bitforms gallery

BITFORMS PREVIEW SHOW
SHOW DATES: 6 26 03 – 7 28 03 OPENING RECEPTION: 6 26 03, 6-8PM
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Lynn Hershman, Michael Najjar, Barbabra Nessim, Michael Rees, Lincoln Schatz, Michael Somoroff

LYNN HERSHMAN
Lynn’s body of work addresses the social construction of female identity and related issues of social conditioning, most often through the narrative construct of an alter ego or “agent.” “I have always been attracted to digital tools and cinematic metaphors that reflect our time, such as privacy in an era of surveillance and personal identity in a time of pervasive manipulation.”

MICHAEL NAJJAR
Najjar investigates the influence of technological developments on our society and our culture. Simulation and hyperreality are the two main concepts underpinning his creative work. A distinctive leitmotif in all his work is the way he intermeshes realistic elements with fictive reality and real fictions. In his work the photographic medium is enriched and enlarged by modern computer technology. His pioneering exploration of this new medium has led to a new mode of visual form which he calls “hybrid photography”.

BARBARA NESSIM
“People play hide and seek with the truth, looking for it in places that exist between the lines. It’s a place that is both elusive and specific. Verbal communication represents only a fraction of what is being said. The rest is all in the visual and visceral clues that are sent between people. Black and White encompasses both ends of the spectrum leaving every nuance of color in-between for you to imagine and decipher.”

MICHAEL REES
Michael Rees’ new work is a blend of high technology, animation, and physical sculpture that is woven around the narrative of absurd virtual life. These multi-limbed creatures are hypnotic as they move in virtual, animate space. The sculptures are literally plucked from the animations and made flesh, they become sculpture, through 3d printing. The sculptures are made up of human legs and fingers joined to fluid, acrobatic bodies. The taxonomy of this species is surprisingly large and diverse. They are combined and recombined to make a strange genus of some other species, something throwback or fast forward, released from the Burgess Shale.

LINCOLN SCHATZ
Schatz’s latest work, Merge, is about memory and the way in which we recall images. The image bank for Merge will take years to fill, pulling from the environment, not from a pre-established video bank. This open, progressive parameter allows for the collision of images. The results are very ethereal, almost dream like. Images float on semi transparent layers and move at varying rates of speed, and opacity but the viewer will always be juxtaposed with all of the other veiled footage. It is like the way one’s mind works as one falls asleep, collapsing time and images into a blur.

MICHAEL SOMOROFF
The blurs of movement recorded by a camera are actual fragments of “fossilized” time. They are not only representations of actual events, they are also patterns of the material that permeates physicality – time. Space/time is the connective tissue of the physical world. Only photography can supply this awesome translation of time into geometry because its mechanics are rooted in it. This quality of photography opens the possibility for an abstract language that includes the continuity of space. Using photography, we can crystallize time into an actual edifice.