bitforms gallery

JUNE BUM PARK & PASCUAL SISTO
Video and Modern Patterns of Control
Two-person exhibition of new video installations
March 8 – April 7, 2007

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a two person exhibition with June Bum Park of Korea and Pascual Sisto of Spain. For both artists, this exhibit marks the New York debut of new video installations.

Videos by June Bum Park (b. 1976, Seoul, Korea) both document his performance as the creator of each work, and expose mechanical aspects in routine activity. Framing a static point of view seen by the observer of a miniature world, Park displays abstract cyclical narratives.

In III Crossing (2002), real-world events on the street at an intersection appear to be manipulated by an enormous hand as large fingers become the barrier between pedestrians and traffic as cars are scooted along. It is projected on the gallery floor emphasizing its aerial perspective. A similar illusion in scale is portrayed in The Occupation (2006), which uses photo-collage as a vehicle to demonstrate continual commercial strip mall construction covering a generic green landscape. Emblems of global corporations and cars in parking lots are replaced one after the other, marking territory that is in constant flux. Puzzle 3 (2006) visualizes the samsara of institutional routine and solving of problems. The video chirps with the noise of squeaky desks and sped up voices, as 16 seated individuals are re-ordered multiple times into 5 rows of pastel blue and yellow desks.

Recent exhibitions of June Bum Park’s work include the 2006 Busan Biennale in Korea, Asia Society and Museum, New York; and Vienna Kunsthalle. He has been featured in solo exhibitions at BMH, ISA and Gallery Jungmiso in Seoul, Korea; and in Berlin at Gallery Koch and Kesslau. Additional exhibitions of Park’s work have taken place at the 2004 Shanghai Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Art Cologne, the Australian Center for Photography, Sydney; Frankfurter Kunstverein; British Museum, London; Le Cube, Paris; Foundazione Samdretto Re Rebaudengi, Turin; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; and Galerie Pascal Vanhoecke, Paris, among other venues.

Visual cycles of urban and natural systems also appear in the video work of Los Angeles-based Pascual Sisto (b. 1975, Ferrol, Spain). Sisto digitally intervenes with otherwise mundane imagery and crafts mesmerizing, impossible realities. Spatial compositions challenging the logic of everyday events–driving a car or witnessing the passage of birds overhead–are activated by the artist’s replication and patterning of form.

Sisto’s two-channel installation Push / Pull (my luck is your misfortune) (2006), rearranges seemingly endless lanes of evening traffic into opposing kaleidoscopic video planes. Approaching white lights from oncoming traffic pass in a tunnel-like flow, receding as red tail lights. The two squarely framed video spaces take on a cosmic scale, reflecting physical logic of the Doppler effect, in which red shift occurs in sources of light moving away from an observer. The viewers sit in a suspended state, neither coming nor going, but in the space in between.

28 Years in the Implicate Order (2004) loops a single phase of activity based on the concepts of quantum mechanics. Set in an empty parking lot that forms a theoretical late-night landscape, twenty-eight basketballs vertically bounce at random. The spheres then align themselves in a wavelike unified bounce to the ground, only to return again to chaos, as the cycle repeats itself. Also on view, 4 is Better (2004), explores the simple power of multiplicity in rhythmic and biomorphic form. Sea gulls cloned into groups of four travel freely across clear skies, sans horizon line, to the sound of waves breaking at the seashore.

Pascual Sisto’s Film and video work has been exhibited internationally at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) in Buenos Aires and the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include Telic Gallery, Los Angeles and Bytheway Projects, Amsterdam. His work has been seen at the LA Freewaves at the Hammer Museum; 7th Manifestation Internationale Vidéo et Art Électronique in Montreal; 2006 Brooklyn Underground Film Festival; Reencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Viper Festival, Basel, Switzerland; Ego Park Gallery, Oakland; Gallery 825, Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Born in Ferrol, Spain, and raised in Barcelona, Pascual Sisto holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He is currently a MFA graduate student in the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA.