Wednesday, July 18, 2012

‘New Media: New Forms’

A new interesting group exhibition by New Jersey-based artists takes a cue from ‘New Media: New Forms’, as the title suggests. This year’s New Jersey Arts Annual: Fine Arts exhibition is devoted, as the title suggest, to new media art.

As the world around us is becoming increasingly digitized, several contemporary artists are expertly incorporating new forms and technologies into their artworks.  The thirteen artists chosen for this juried show produce works that innovatively and actively engage with digital media, in terms of elements like process, content, or form. Working in video, installation, photography, sound,sculpture, drawing, performance etc, they have produced enchanting works.

The participating artists are: Gregg Biermann, Valerie Huhn, Efrat Kedem, Andrew Demirjian, JC Lenochan, Joan Pamboukes, Kara Rooney, Keith Kostelny, Joe Scanlan, Peter Tilgner, Vincent Salvati, Matthew Wilson, and Liselot van der Heijden.

Most of the works in the show use familiar technology and strategies that are endemic to contemporary art, such as sampling, appropriating as well as remaking older works of art. An example of this is ‘Los Nuevos Monumentos de Passaic’ (2012) by Joe Scanlan. Anyone well familiar with contemporary art trends sure will recognize the obvious reference to  a classic conceptual essay-artwork ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ (1967) by Robert Smithson that employed the art-magazine layout as its peculiar medium.

Another work, which looks to piggyback on an existing masterpiece, is  ‘Labyrinthine’ (2010) by Gregg Biermann, a video that makes use of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958) as starting point.  ‘New Media: New Forms’ runs through July 22 at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, N.J.

The New Jersey Arts Annual is a unique series of Fine Arts and Crafts exhibitions highlighting the works of visual artists and craftspeople in the state. The series is co-sponsored by the New Jersey Council on the Arts/Department of State; the Montclair Art Museum; the Morris Museum; the Newark Museum; the Noyes Museum of Art and the New Jersey State Museum.

The work in digital media for this series was juried by Curator of Contemporary Art of the Montclair Art Museum, Alexandra Schwartz and Kelly Baum, Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum.

No comments:

Post a Comment