The Curator's Eye
- — March 1, 2010
Out of this World
Talk about luck! Thanks to the Kirkland Arts Center/University of Washington Emerging Curator Initiative, the thesis show by museology grad student Jill Hardy, Off the Map, gets a major KAC installation featuring nine major artists (including world-famous Maya Lin). Not only that, but she won a Firestone grant to publish a show catalog.
What put her on the map was an inspired idea: the collision of objective science and creative subjectivity represented by mapping. “Maps reveal what’s too big to see or too abstract to experience,” says Hardy.
Scott Bailey, Above Rainier, 2006, extruded polystyrene, celluclay, latex, acrylic, canvas, live video projection. Dimensions vary.
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“Mapping is a process that takes the three-dimensional world and edits out tons of information, making it two-dimensional,” she says. “Scott Bailey’s Above Rainier inverts and subverts that whole process. He starts with a two-dimensional painting, captures it on a video camera, and then projects the live feed directly onto a sculpture of the mountain. You can walk between the sculpture and the video projector, and you yourself are projected onto the mountain.” “I’ve never climbed the mountain,” says Bailey. “The piece is intended to raise questions about the authentic experience of a place. I wanted to see what I could do with information that can be obtained by anyone with a computer, from anywhere in the world, about anywhere in the world. I wondered if I could create an expression of the sublime quality of Mt. Rainier while referencing only virtual representations.” The KAC installation resembles the photo above, but with a mirror to bend and extend the video projection. The show’s other reality-bending sights include Liz Hickok’s Suburban Development: Las Vegas in Jell-O and Claude Zervas’s Skagit, a fluorescent sculpture of the Skagit River powered by electricity from the Skagit dams. Explains Hardy, “The artists enable us to see what we can’t see.” |
THE ARTIST Rainier maps consulted by Bailey: 20 to 30 Countries visited by Bailey: 54 (on 6 continents) Places visited by Hardy as a photojournalist: Hardy’s total years as a photojournalist: 7 Number of Jell-O houses Hickok checked in her airport luggage for the show: 2,000 |
Off the Map
Kirkland Arts Center, through March 10
For more information: kirklandartscenter.org/gallery.html
Read artist Ryan Molenkamp's "peer review" of this show on the CAB.
