bitforms gallery

LINCOLN SCHATZ
generative video installations
January 26 – February 24, 2007

The debuts of Collision of Memory work for One Arts Plaza in Dallas and an installation for Chicago’s new Helmut Jahn-designed high-rise.

“Schatz is documenting the present, showing snippets from the past and continuously turning both into video compositions. It’s art in constant flux.”

-Robert L. Pincus, The San Diego Union-Tribune

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a third solo exhibition of Chicago-based artist Lincoln Schatz. This exhibit marks the New York debut of Schatz’s generative multi-channel video installation series. Remarkable in vision and scale, these painterly compositions collapse time, depicting dynamic landscapes and portraits. Visualizing the memory of an environment, these works reconsider fixed notions of history, time and place. Each unique artwork records, stores and displays video that recounts its record of exhibition, building a distinct visible aura.

As art critic Robert L. Pincus describes, “Schatz may have created this work, but its imagery moves away from his control. It combines whatever transpires in front of the camera, which is then transformed by software. In a sense, the art becomes its own artist, creating as it goes.”

This past year Schatz has been commissioned to create several large-scale memory video works for permanent exhibition in public spaces. On exhibit at bitforms gallery are previews of two large video commissions, the One Arts Plaza video walls opening in Dallas March 2007, and a four-channel installation for Chicago’s Helmut Jahn-designed 600 Fairbanks high-rise opening in October 2007.

Featured in this exhibition is one of the two interactive video walls commissioned for the entrance of One Arts Plaza, opening in the redesigned Dallas Arts District on March 29, 2007. Consisting of two 9’ x 9’ video walls (each composed of six 40” x 60” screens), the piece is one of the largest interactive new media works to be permanently displayed in a public space. Continuously collected videos from the artwork’s own environment are selectively displayed onscreen in four overlapping layers, merging past with present.

From the moment the One Arts Plaza building opens in Dallas, two cameras (one for each wall) will begin recording and storing video from the lobby environment that is culled daily for up to eight years. Each video wall displays a separate visual account of the same setting, and mirrors the relative experiences of two people witnessing an event simultaneously. Any public actions the cameras collect influence the growth of the artwork over time.

This exhibit will also feature one of the four 40” x 60” video screens to be permanently installed, in a 2 x 2 matrix, in the lobby of the Helmut Jahn-designed 600 Fairbanks high-rise in Chicago, opening October 2007. Visualizing the flux of urban landscape in this multi-perspective video installation, Schatz follows the development of a building from its incursion into the ground to its emergence onto the Chicago skyscape. Acting as an observer and chronicler of history, the artwork will display approximately 20 months of video layers collected from three cameras mounted at various points on the tower crane and on the adjacent building, in addition to handheld footage captured weekly onsite by Schatz. The onscreen video imagery pulled from this four-channel video memory database continuously recombines, and composes a time-based generative collage. As the building grows, so does the complexity of the piece.

In addition to the New York exhibition, Schatz’s Cluster will be part of the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibition January 18 -28, 2007. In Cluster saturated videos ebb and flow across the screen, merging fleeting video portraits and imagery that is collected over eight years. Organic geometries are cut out of time and layered on top of each other, constantly in flux.

May 2007 a three-screen interactive video commission for the McCormick Place Convention Center will open in Chicago. February 15-19, 2007, Schatz’s work will be part of the bitforms gallery booth at ARCO in Madrid, Spain.

Recent exhibitions of work by Lincoln Schatz (b. 1963, United States) include the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California; Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; bitforms Seoul, Korea; and the Pulse art fair in Miami, Florida. Recent and upcoming permanent public art installations include the McCormick Place Convention Center (May 2007, Chicago), the Helmut Jahn-designed 600 Fairbanks high-rise (October 2007, Chicago), One Arts Plaza (March 2007, Dallas), and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies (Fall 2005, Chicago). Private commissions include I Am Here, created in Shanghai for contemporary art collector Pearl Lam. Lincoln Schatz received his BA from Bennington College in 1986 and was the recipient of a CORE fellowship to the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He is a co-founder of open-node, the Chicago chapter of The Upgrade! International.