bitforms gallery

MICHAEL JOAQUIN GREY:
Spatial Philosopher
SHOW DATES: 2 27 03 – 3 29 03 OPENING RECEPTION: 3 1 03, 6-8PM
Michael Joaquin Grey began in the center of the art world in 1990 and rapidly pioneered a new type of creative practice, which is a prototype of today’s new media artist. Over the last decade his work has extended from the gallery into social sculpture, biotechnology, information technology, product design, education, and mass media. Grey’s artistic exploration led to the invention of Zoob, a modeling system and toy that emulates dynamic and living systems. Most recently he has been exploring computational cinema and choreography with sound, motion and video primitives. His collaborations and practice have been a model and precursor to how artists would adapt their practice.

Grey was influenced very early on by the Charles and Ray Eames film, The Powers of Ten. As a sculptor reaching maturity in the middle of “postmodern” dogma he found refuge in exploring other orders of magnitude that were beyond our personal scale. His education, imagination and intuition lead him to consider and explore ideas across systems of behavior and expression. The microcosmic, the macrocosmic, information space, and the body (biological) were the territories he wanted to explore as a sculptor, and ‘spatial philosopher’.

In this work, Grey is escaping the self-referential language of art, striving to be free from the traps of the dominant reductive and seductive postmodern gravitational pull. Here, he uses the language of science (as a readymade) to recapitulate the process (and ontogeny) of how we got into this predicament – this time using avirtual information world.

Grey is interested in the decay of the primary narrative. He is suspicious of the limits imposed by linguistic syntax to describe the complexity of spatial behavior. He has focused on the pedagogical problem of how to best experience, understand and explain complex spatial and natural systems. “It is too easy to apply old models and language for the sake of explanation and exploitation of information. I like to remind myself of the aspect of play and storytelling which is so essential to our faith in western culture and our process of creation – something our high culture often represses. I try to recapitulate the process as a first principles experiment (bottom up) so not to easily forget the problems and paradox of development and discovery.”

Grey has exhibited at Brooke Alexander Editions, New York, Lisson Gallery, London, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, and Stuart Regen Gallery, Los Angeles. Museum shows include Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Serpentine Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY. He has been published globally including, The NY Times, Washington Post, Artbyte, Flash Art, ID Design, Leonardo Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Grey received a BS from UC Berkeley in Genetics and an MFA from Yale. He lives in San Francisco and New York.