BILL ALBERTINI
This work is one of a series of images of three models that Albertini built in 2002 and 2003, based on the imagery from the 1972 Soviet sci-fi film Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film depicts the memories and fantasies of the occupants of a space station in orbit around the planet Solaris, acting as an overall metaphor for the weakening quality of life in the Soviet State. Albertini's visual representations of the film act as a commentary on how technologies of digital imaging and reproduction become the source of new ideas and imagined situations.
JAN KOPP
In his photographs, Jan Kopp pulls us into a pataphysical world, Alfred Jarry's term for the poetic and unstable world of referents and pointers separated from reality. The modular nature of his images remind us of Wittgenstein's famous remark from the Tractatus Philosophicus, stating that "the form is the possibility of the structure." One is constantly confronted by both the familiarity of these structures, while simultaneously being unsure of their true nature.
SERVANE MARY
As part of a series of women's portraits made with tempera on wood, this work exemplifies the artist's focus on the visual language of portraiture. Servane Mary has skillfully reproduced faces taken from magazines and placed them on a plain background, omitting any formal figuration. In this way, the emotions shown on the women's faces become the subject matter of the work, creating a profound style of representation that rises above the genre of portraiture.
CURTIS MITCHELL
When Curtis Mitchell entered the art scene in the 1980s with his own kind of process art, he was known for altering prefabricated materials and found objects with dirt, glass, and even chemicals. In his latest series entitled "Meltdowns," Mitchell abandons objects for large-scale images. These prints are produced on photographic paper and treated with chemicals to create gorgeous patterns of light drips and streaks.
LYLE STARR
Lyle Starr's brightly colored, puzzle-like paintings inspire reflection on the mediated reality of daily life. In their overlapping and interlocking parts, Starr locates the fragments of a culturally defined "self," creating works in which the individual is both lost and found. Achieved through the use of opaque areas of color and the careful management of space, the transparent imagery causes the collapse of signs and objects, guiding us to see through them to ourselves.
PAWEL WOJTASIK
With his twenty-two minute video,The Aquarium, 2006, Pawel Wojtasik makes a powerful statement about the devastating impact man has on the environment. Filmed in Alaska's Resurrection Bay, near Prince William Sound (where the Exxon Valdez dumped eleven million gallons of heavy crude oil in 1989), and at the Alaska SeaLife Center aquarium in Seward (built by Exxon in 1998 in an attempt to repair its public image), The Aquarium hauntingly examines the domestication of marine life.