Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now lives in London. Over the past 30 years, Christian Marclay has explored the fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sounds and music into a visible, physical form through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video. Marclay began his exploration into sound and art through performances with turntables in 1979, while he was still a student. Early work includes a series of ‘Recycled Records’ (1980-86), fragmented and reassembled vinyl records that became hybrid objects that could be played, replete with abrupt leaps in tone and sound.

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Surround Sounds, 2014-15
Video installation
Four silent synchronised projected animations
Duration: 13 minutes and 40 seconds, looped
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The Clock, 2010

Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a cinematic tour de force that unfolds on the screen in real time through thousands of film excerpts that form a 24-hour montage. Appropriated from the last 100 years of cinema’s rich history, the film clips chronicle the hours and minutes of the 24-hour period, often by displaying a watch or clock. The Clock incorporates scenes of everything from car chases and board rooms to emergency wards, bank heists, trysts, and high-noon shootouts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=491&v=6cOhWtyXGXQ

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Crossfire, 2007

4 channel video projection

The video installation Crossfire creates a charged, physical space in which the viewer is surrounded by four large projections playing a rapid montage of guns and gunfire. The gun is perhaps the most iconic image in the media, a constant presence in everything from newscasts about faraway wars and local crimes to its persistent role as a narrative device in movies. While guns always foreshadow violence, they also offer a false promise of safety from an outside threat. Marclay plays with this twin sense of dread and fascination.

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Telephones, 1995
Duration: 7 minutes 30 seconds
Video

Christian Marclay’s “Telephones” (1995), a 7 1/2-minute compilation of brief Hollywood film clips that creates a narrative of its own. These linked-together snippets of scenes involve innumerable well-known actors such as Cary Grant, Tippi Hedren, Ray Milland, Humphrey Bogart and Meg Ryan, who dial, pick up the receiver, converse, react, say good-bye and hang up. In doing so, they express a multitude of emotions–surprise, desire, anger, disbelief, excitement, boredom–ultimately leaving the impression that they are all part of one big conversation. The piece moves easily back and forth in time, as well as between color and black-and-white, aided by Marclay’s whimsical notions of continuity.

Sol Lewitt

American sculptor, draughtsman, lithographer and etcher. Born in Hartford, Connecticut. Studied at Syracuse University, New York, 1945-9. Abandoned painting in 1962 and began to experiment with abstract black and white reliefs, followed in 1963 by relief constructions with nested enclosures projecting into space, and box- and table-like constructions. First one-man exhibition at the Daniels Gallery, New York, 1965. From 1965-6 worked in series using a simple form such as an open or closed cube as module to create structures in accordance with a pre-determined, logical system. Starting in 1966 with Serial Project No.1 also published a series of books constituting a parallel system. Wrote an influential article ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ first published 1967. Taught at the Museum of Modern Art School, New York, 1964-7, at Cooper Union, New York, 1967-8, at the School of Visual Arts, New York, 1969-70 and at New York University from 1970. Began in 1968 to create wall drawings, to be carried out by himself or others in accordance with his specifications, and also produced series of lithographs, etchings and screenprints.

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Wall Drawings, 2006

Installation view, Lisson Gallery, 29 Bell St, London
29 November 2006 – 20 January 2007

Wall Drawing #1139: Forms composed of bands of black and white, 2004

Acrylic paint
Dimensions variable
Installation view, Lisson Gallery, London

Five Open Geometric Structures, 1979

Acrylic on mahogany

Open Geometric Structure 3, 1990

Paint on wood
98 x 98 x 438 cm
38.6 x 38.6 x 172.4 in

A video about his process

Bonus Video:
Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse – Read by Benedict Cumberbatch

Artwork information and images sourced from Lisson Gallery

Euan Macdonald

LA-based artist Euan Macdonald has a multi-disciplinary practice that includes drawing, video, sculpture and installation. Through these disparate media, he focuses attention on the ordinary, attenuating the viewer’s gaze on everyday subjects, and asking people to question and reconsider the very objects and occurrences they take for granted.

http://www.intrvl.net/work/brakestand.html

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The Start of a Gauntlet of Beings, 2013
Collaboration with Kevin Hanley
Wood, lights, phosphorescent paint

The project originates from observation of the light that passes through the given space of exhibition, and from the form of a boat out of local history. In the exhibition space, the gallery floor suggests an expanse of water on which a sculpture with the likeness of a boat has been created. Defined by ambient and artificial light, the sculpture itself, varnished in a phosphorescent compound, becomes luminous in darkness. Illuminated then reciprocating light in darkness, the installation is articulated to the viewer in two distinct ways.

TAKE THE DARK OUT OF THE NIGHT TIME, 2010
Temporary LED high-rise architectural lighting installed on a low-rise hutong bulding
Arrow Factory, Beijing

Taking a cue from the abundant LED lights that line the skyscrapers, office buildings and highway underpasses throughout Chinese cities, Macdonald has chosen to illuminate the space atop Arrow Factory with gleaming blue lights that radiate upwards into the sky. With this, an isolated and insignificant corner of the city is mysteriously accentuated and embellished. Macdonald’s gesture — transplanting the visual language of glitzy, brightly colored lights that adorn contemporary architecture onto the low-rise neighborhood of Jianchang Hutong — might appear resoundingly formal but is imbued with the artist’s continuing interst in inventing, capturing, and recreating the enigmatic and inexplicable phenomena of our lives.

The Tower, 2004
A full-scale replica of the top 25 feet of the CN Tower, Toronto
Temporary public sculpture. Wood, steel, scenic materials

House (everythinghappensatonce), 1999 (excerpt)
TRT: 19:54 Color Sound
Single Channel Video Projection

“This time frame transcends the direct experience of the event, and so the artist allows it to be purely intuited … The intuition ends up approaching the idea of an unpredictable, potentially infinite duration.” (Verzotti, Giorgio, “Mysterioso: The Oneiric Work of Euan Macdonald,” euan macdonald (everythinghappensatonce), Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, Nurenberg, Germany, 2005)

Sourced from Euan MacDonald’s Website

Micah Lexier

Micah Lexier is a Toronto-based multimedia artist whose many-tiered practice includes sculpture, installation, photography and text-based work, as well as curation. Lexier graduated with an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984.

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This One, That One, 2013

A video consisting of a number of vignettes in which I present and manipulate items from my archive of used books and found objects.

THIS IS AN ARROW, 2009.

Each arrow is made of waterjet-cut ¼” aluminum and enamel paint, and each arrow has a text etched into the front of it. No two arrows have the same text and each text starts with the phrase This is an arrow followed by a qualifying phrase. For example: This is an arrow pointing at a painting, This is an arrow left unpainted, or This is an arrow two feel long. A number of the above images are from a site-speficic installation installed at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY in 2010.

A Portrait of David, 1994.

Life-size photographs of men and boys named David, one of each each from age 1 to age 75. Commissioned by and presented at The Winnipeg Art Gallery

David Then & Now, 2004.

Bus shelter project presented throughout downtown Winnipeg, presented by Plug In ICA. This is the follow up project to A Portrait of David, in which we photographed one David of every age, from age 1 to age 75. For this project, David Then & Now, we located as many of the original Davids as possible and photographed them exactly 10 years later.

Sourced from Micah Lexier’s Tumblr

http://artmatters.ca/wp/2010/03/micah-lexiers-39-wooden-balls-video/

Dave Dyment

Dave Dyment is Toronto-based artist whose practice includes audio, video, photography, performance, writing and curating, and the production of artists’ books and multiples. His work mines pop culture for shared associations and alternate meanings, investigating the language and grammar of music, cinema, television and literature, in order to arrive at a kind a folk taxonomy of a shared popular vocabulary.

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The Morning Has Gold In Its Mouth, 2013
A frame-by-frame account of Kubrick’s The Shining, each annotated with text from fan sites, youtube clips and fan forums. The four-volume set includes countless arcane theories about the director’s intentions.

A lenticular photograph housed in an antique mirror frame. The photograph reflects a nearby dresser and (as in the film) the number of books changes as the viewer passes by.

Timeline, 2016
Video installation, 85 minutes20,000 years of cinematic history condensed into the length of a feature film. Comprised entirely of establishing shots from cinema and television, Timeline begins in the year 17,000 BC and ends in 2805 AD.Presented at Ontario Place, as part of InFuture, 2016.

Sidereal Time, 2009
“Dave Dyment’s mirror ball installation was fantastic. I walked to Victoria Park where most of the events were happening and could see his piece at a distance. As I approached, I could discern how it was made and I thought that hanging a bunch of disco balls from a crane in front of what would become an outdoor dance floor seemed a bit obvious. I was rolling this sort of evaluation around in my head, thinking of what I might write later, but as I got under the deluge of cascading light I lost my balance and was hit with vertigo. Something about the intensity of the stage lighting bouncing off so many mirrored, reflective surfaces resulted in this complete wash or carpeting of tiny, moving discs of light. The space became wholly immersive and the ground was undulating with a gentle yet disorienting wash of pale yet intensely vibrant speckles. I went away convinced by the work’s elegance and simplicity. Dyment’s piece created an insightful instance of something purely visual riffing on the space of music and the exuberant theatricality of an outdoor concert.”

– Sky Glaboush, Akimbo 01/10/09

The Day After, Tomorrow
Earthquakes, fires, floods, meteors, air attacks and other doomsday scenarios play on a bank of twenty video monitors. The exhaustive cataloguing amasses a near-comprehensive collection of disaster cinema tropes.The clips are arranged geographically, so that the viewer may watch the rapture arrive around the world simultaneously. Tidal waves hit shores, landmark buildings are destroyed, and general panic ensues.Isolated from any larger context, the apocalypse plays out like fireworks, and the utopian social cooperation that typically follows in catastrophe cinema is unseen, as the clips loop back onto themselves.

Sourced from Dave Dyment’s Website

Kelly Mark

Born: Welland, Ontario 1967

Lives and works in Toronto, Canada

Artist Statement

I have always had an intense preoccupation with the differing shades of pathos and humour found in the repetitive mundane tasks, routines and rituals of everyday life. Hidden within these spans of time can be found startling moments of poetic individuation, and an imprint of the individual within the commonplace rituals of society. Individuation, especially within this uniformity, although subtle and frequently paradoxical, is something I find myself returning to again and again. Through my ‘will to order’ and my frequently inane sense of humour my objective is the investigation, documentation and validation of these singular ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ moments of our lives…

In & Out – 1997 ongoing until 2032

Steel time card racks & punched cards

Current dimensions of installed work is approximately 28 feet

This work was purchased by a private collector in 1999 and he continues to purchase each years cards

Installation view of 1997-2008: Time as Activity at Netwerk Center for Contemporary Art. Aalst, Belgium 2009

Ongoing project where I keep track of my ‘working hours’ in the studio on an old punch clock. Started in 1997, this project will end in 2032 when i turn 65.

Glow House #2 – 2003

House, 40-50 television sets, coaxial cables, splitters & signal booster

Solo off site project for The Ikon Gallery. Birmingham UK, 2003. Curated by Jonathan Watkins & Deborah Kermode

One House & 35-40 television sets distributed throughout and all tuned to the same channel.

The small flicker of light emanating from each TV is then turned into a ‘pulse’ of light throughout the entire house. As the scenes change, from whatever television program is airing at the moment, the house flashes and pulses as all televisions are in sync with one another. Gives the eerie impressions that the entire house has been gutted to create one vast illuminated space. During commercials it is as if fireworks are going off inside…

Public Disturbance HB Series: Take 1, Take 2, Take 3 – 2010 (3.5 min video excerpt)
Single-channel video in 3 parts / Three-channel video installation
16 minutes, 19 seconds
Edition of 5 + 1 AP
Videographer: Nelson Rogers, Sound Engineer: David Best

Edited video from a live 4-hour public performance Public Disturbance where professional actors were hired to pose as couples and reenact various domestic based arguments from movie scipts in a public setting. The actual performance included 3 separate actor-couples each performing different fight scenes. In this video version of the work I focus on just one couple and follow their re-occurring arguement in various locations, over the course of the evening.

Horroridor – 2008
Six-channel video installation
10 minutes
Commissioned by Wayne Baerwaldt for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, 2008

Utilizing found footage from various genres including horror-thriller-sci/fi-action-drama-comedy. The installation examines Hollywood’s construction of the reaction to the unknown. Horroridor strips away narrative to a non-articulated response of fear, horror, pain, madness, rage and frustration, by isolating men and women screaming to unknown forces that threaten existence.

Sourced from Kelly Mark’s Website