Past Exhibitions
2020
SWITCH
December 18, 2020 - February 7, 2021
Kaiser Gallery is proud to feature artists and creatives from the art and technology sectors who utilize light as their medium and source of inspiration. The evolution of art has led it to become more and more intertwined with technology and reshaping the definition of what we consider art along the way. SWITCH features a wide variety of artists and creators who challenge art in different directions through the implementation of technology. Artists and creators alike explore different expressions of light through multidimensional studies, including but not limited to, sculptural works, printmaking, projection art, and virtual reality. The blending of different types of media through innovative practices may even provide a glimpse into the future.
Presenting works by Laura Bigger, Emily Dzieweczynski, GIBSON + RECODER, Carol Anne McChrystal, Haumed Rahmani, Joseph Santarpia, and HR-Stamenov.
Kaiser Gallery is proud to feature artists and creatives from the art and technology sectors who utilize light as their medium and source of inspiration. The evolution of art has led it to become more and more intertwined with technology and reshaping the definition of what we consider art along the way. SWITCH features a wide variety of artists and creators who challenge art in different directions through the implementation of technology. Artists and creators alike explore different expressions of light through multidimensional studies, including but not limited to, sculptural works, printmaking, projection art, and virtual reality. The blending of different types of media through innovative practices may even provide a glimpse into the future.
Presenting works by Laura Bigger, Emily Dzieweczynski, GIBSON + RECODER, Carol Anne McChrystal, Haumed Rahmani, Joseph Santarpia, and HR-Stamenov.
Laura Bigger
My work explores the relationships that exist among humans, animals, and ecosystems, particularly in terms of the food chain, raw materials, and the human tendency to exert control over natural systems. It explores existential quandaries such as what it means to be a human today, how we can live in the world responsibly, and what our obligation is to do so. As a multimedia artist, I question anthropocentric viewpoints and interpret the man made environment primarily through print, drawing and installation. Celestial Bodies is a series of prints that uses symbolism to articulate the concept of a tipping point. Some works portray the point at which light approaching a black hole changes direction, having been drawn toward the black hole’s mass. Others portray light emerging carelessly from a prism with no obstacles. Components such as slices of water are either upright, indicating an expected stasis, or upside-down, hinting at an eerie world with laws of nature unfathomable to us. While this series is more abstracted than much of my recent work, it manifests an environmental concern and a visual experimentation with balance, optimism, pessimism, and escapism.
Laura Bigger 'Constellations' (2019) Monoprint: intaglio & relief with copper leaf and reflective glass beads. 10.5" x 14.5”
Laura Bigger Bio
Laura Bigger is an Assistant Professor of Art and runs the printmaking area at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO. She has previously taught at the University of Nevada, Reno and Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, MN. Originally from Boulder, CO, Bigger received a BA in Studio Art and Hispanic Studies from Colorado College in 2008 and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2013. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally.
Laura Bigger is an Assistant Professor of Art and runs the printmaking area at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO. She has previously taught at the University of Nevada, Reno and Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, MN. Originally from Boulder, CO, Bigger received a BA in Studio Art and Hispanic Studies from Colorado College in 2008 and an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2013. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally.
Emily Dzieweczynski
I’m curious about empathy. My portfolio moves between science, art, and technology. It questions the lengths and limitations of these fields when they intersect at the concept of empathy. This interest in empathy comes from equal parts hope, stubbornness, and cynicism. I wanted to understand what could make people do good. The research began by studying Daniel Batson’s Empathy-Altruism hypothesis. This hypothesis states that the more empathic concern we feel towards an entity, the more altruistic motivation is experienced. Empathy is facilitated by both understanding or sharing emotional remembrances and one’s ability to project and experience bodily sensations in relation to another entity. My work is interdisciplinary. Psychological literature informs art making decisions, bringing something that is analyzed into something that is felt. I conduct research through data collection and documentation. Work in two-dimensional or new media functions as empathic stimuli, questioning how we connect and experience empathy. Ultimately, your reality is vastly different than mine and I want to understand that.
Emily Dzieweczynski 'An Audio Analysis of Home' (2020) 3D Rendering, Ambisonic Sound, and VR. 3:50 min
Emily Dzieweczynski is a multimedia artist, creative researcher, designer, and educator. She is interested in the intersection of science and art, particularly where they meet at the concept of empathy. Emily is a graduate from Gustavus Adolphus College, holding Bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Psychological Science, and studied Fine Arts Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work takes the form of drawing, printmaking, writing, and new media; including code, virtual reality, 3D modeling, web-based media, sound, and video.
Emily’s work has been shown at venues such as the Target Gallery, the American Swedish Institute, Rosalux Gallery, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Gustavus Adolphus College, and the Children’s Museum of Minnesota. She has received funding through the National Science Foundation, an Arts and Cultural Heritage Grant, the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, and Gustavus Adolphus College.
Emily’s work has been shown at venues such as the Target Gallery, the American Swedish Institute, Rosalux Gallery, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Gustavus Adolphus College, and the Children’s Museum of Minnesota. She has received funding through the National Science Foundation, an Arts and Cultural Heritage Grant, the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, and Gustavus Adolphus College.
GIBSON + RECODER
Coming Attraction GIBSON + RECODER In our installation work, we use projected light to articulate space and time. Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theater. To remove it from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift, elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us.
Gibson + Recoder 'Solid Light Film' (2017) 16mm film projectors, acrylic cylinder, and hardware. 14" x 41" x 13"
Collaborating artists Sandra Gibson (b. 1968, Portland, OR) and Luis Recoder (b. 1971, San Francisco, CA) have been exhibiting their expanded cinema installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the permanent collections of major art museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany. Artist awards and commissions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, National Endowment for the Art’s U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art in New York. Lecturing appointments include both long and short-term teaching residencies in the media departments of the University of Colorado Boulder, Denison University in Ohio, and California Institute for the Arts. They are featured artists and research associates of RESET THE APPARATUS! A Survey of the Photographic and the Filmic in Contemporary Art, hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. Gibson + Recoder live and work in New York.
Carol Anne McChrystal
My materially-driven sculptures work through chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacies of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity. Inhabiting a tension between Earth’s immense geological history and the absurd everyday experience of plastic and labor, I consolidate the painstakingly hand-made with mass-produced consumables to pry open a speculative space to resist the means-ends rationale of late capitalism.
Carol Anne McChrystal 'Media Archaeology I' (2020) Dual layer DVD-Rs, kernite, dye, and copper nails. 60" x 60"
Born into the dual diaspora of the Philippines and Ireland, Carol Anne McChrystal is a Los Angeles–based artist and designer. Her materially-driven sculpture and videos work through chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacy of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity. Inhabiting the tension between Earth’s immense history and the absurdly mundane everyday experience of plastic and labor, her practice consolidates painstakingly hand-made and mass-produced consumables in order to pry open a speculative space in which to resist the means-ends rationale of late capitalism.
As part of the collaborative duo Nightmare City, she has created immersive environments that have been exhibited at Alter Space in San Francisco, The Luminary in St. Louis, and Horse and Pony in Berlin, and has shown video works at Essex Flowers in New York, MASS Gallery in Austin, and ACRETV in Chicago. Her writing has been published in critical arts publications like Art Practical and Temporary, and she recently self-published a collection of poetry titled, “Entropical Latitudes.” In tandem with her art practice, she organizes within the local Filipino community in Los Angeles with GABRIELA, the anti-imperialist Filipino women’s group.
As part of the collaborative duo Nightmare City, she has created immersive environments that have been exhibited at Alter Space in San Francisco, The Luminary in St. Louis, and Horse and Pony in Berlin, and has shown video works at Essex Flowers in New York, MASS Gallery in Austin, and ACRETV in Chicago. Her writing has been published in critical arts publications like Art Practical and Temporary, and she recently self-published a collection of poetry titled, “Entropical Latitudes.” In tandem with her art practice, she organizes within the local Filipino community in Los Angeles with GABRIELA, the anti-imperialist Filipino women’s group.
Haumed Rahmani
Just as we learn who we are through the process of self reflection, so too does this projection piece form its own emotions, memories, and identity by seeing itself through itself. The camera, projector, and cross-dichroic prism act as the organs of a feedback loop of converging and diverging light, always recreating the present as a fractalized view of the past. In this way, the system hopes to achieve some internal meaning.
Every word in the dictionary
is defined by other words in the dictionary,
like every moment in time
is defined by other moments:
a language of fractals,
only ever returning to itself.
is defined by other words in the dictionary,
like every moment in time
is defined by other moments:
a language of fractals,
only ever returning to itself.
Haumed Rahmani 'Self-Reflection' (2020) digital projection and prism.
Straddling creative, scientific, and digital frameworks, Haumed Rahmani spends his time thinking about questions that lead to better questions, in hopes of finding a guiding compass through the future. His code is being used by the likes of Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Max Planck Institute, and he’s slated to present at the International Liquid Crystal Conference 2022. With work ranging from microscope imaging to generative weaving and short film, Haumed is foremost a toolbuilder and communicator. He is currently working toward his PhD in Chemical Physics at the Advanced Materials & Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University.
Joseph Santarpia
My practice captures a stark contrast of darkness and luminosity, referencing both a sense of visceral interiority and expansive space in order to address curiosities regarding embodiment and release, and autopoiesis and sympoiesis. I achieve a range of abstracted and representational imagery using pigment and fluid on paper along with monotype printing and photographic processes. Through series’ of ink and watercolor paintings, collages, cyanotypes, and some 3 and 4D pieces, my work indexes the comparability of and transitory nature between interiority, flesh, bodily mechanics, and corporeal structure, to that of the expanse of space into which bodily actions extend. My materials interact through varying ratios of fluid, light, and object. The cyanotype process is fundamentally photography and printmaking—chemical exposure to UV light and transferring objects onto paper. The creative capacity of the chemicals, light, and objects on the paper surface allow this media to be treated painterly, as my "Scope" and "Range" series are. Evoking the aesthetics of medical imagery (MRI and X-ray) and using exercise equipment as the subject of the image transfer, this work is imbued with a context of medicalization and rehabilitation.
Joseph Santarpia 'BOUND vi' (2020) Cyanotype. 45" x 33"
Joseph Santarpia's work leverages autopoiesis—the self-creative capacity of material—to explore questions of release, embodiment, and landscape. He received his MFA from Stony Brook University in 2020, and a bachelors degree in Visual Art Education from SUNY New Paltz in 2017. He's shown in galleries across the United States, including: Small Green Door, East Los Angeles, CA; Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; LIC Arts Open, Long Island City, NY; The Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition, Brooklyn, NY; Limner Gallery, Hudson NY; The Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook, NY; Gallery North, Setauket, NY. He is the recipient of awards including The Goldberger Fellowship and the Dorothy L. Memorial Purchase Prize. Santarpia is also an active, New York State certified art educator currently working for the Lowville Academy & Central School District and previously for the Gallery North ArtVentures Program and Stony Brook University’s Studio Art Program.
At age 18, Santarpia had a spinal fusion of his L5, S1 vertebrae, altering his bodily reality. Because of this, he has grown to be intensely attentive to his bodily sensations. The lived experience and physical consequences of this procedure have since informed his life and art practice greatly. The two main components from which Santarpia’s practice manifest are (1) material approach and process, and (2) conceptual and biographical context. Both his material approach and the spinal fusion surgery he underwent, rely on systems of collaborative creativity (autopoiesis/sympoiesis). The fusion surgery uses bone graft, which is essentially a glue that hardens or fuses into bone over time. The procedure sets a rigid ground using rods and screws along and into the vertebrae for bodily regeneration to take its course. Similarly, Santarpia’s art practice facilitates a system of interaction: the flow of liquids and sediments; gravitational forces; evaporation; crystallization; state changes of liquids, gasses, and solids; UV light; emulsification; muscle contraction; respiration; cognition.
At age 18, Santarpia had a spinal fusion of his L5, S1 vertebrae, altering his bodily reality. Because of this, he has grown to be intensely attentive to his bodily sensations. The lived experience and physical consequences of this procedure have since informed his life and art practice greatly. The two main components from which Santarpia’s practice manifest are (1) material approach and process, and (2) conceptual and biographical context. Both his material approach and the spinal fusion surgery he underwent, rely on systems of collaborative creativity (autopoiesis/sympoiesis). The fusion surgery uses bone graft, which is essentially a glue that hardens or fuses into bone over time. The procedure sets a rigid ground using rods and screws along and into the vertebrae for bodily regeneration to take its course. Similarly, Santarpia’s art practice facilitates a system of interaction: the flow of liquids and sediments; gravitational forces; evaporation; crystallization; state changes of liquids, gasses, and solids; UV light; emulsification; muscle contraction; respiration; cognition.
HR Stamenov
HR-Stamenov was born in 1981 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. In 2007 he obtained his Master’s Degree in Painting from Academia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Italy in the class of professor Omar Galliani. HR-Stamenov work combines technology, new media, video, traditional oil paintings, and site-specific light Installations.
HR-Stamenov exhibited in: Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, (2009); Lu.C.C.A. Museum - Center Of Contemporary Art, Italy (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia, Bulgaria (2011); La Triennale di Milano (2009 ,2018); Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland (2012); Sofia Arsenal - Museum for Contemporary Art (2012); Sofia City Art Gallery (2009,10,11,12,13,14); Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria (2015) Structura Gallery, Sofia (2017); Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viareggio, Italy (2018); CAMeC, La Spezia, Italy (2020) Æter Haga, The Hague, Netherlands (2020).
HR-Stamenov exhibited in: Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, (2009); Lu.C.C.A. Museum - Center Of Contemporary Art, Italy (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia, Bulgaria (2011); La Triennale di Milano (2009 ,2018); Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland (2012); Sofia Arsenal - Museum for Contemporary Art (2012); Sofia City Art Gallery (2009,10,11,12,13,14); Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria (2015) Structura Gallery, Sofia (2017); Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viareggio, Italy (2018); CAMeC, La Spezia, Italy (2020) Æter Haga, The Hague, Netherlands (2020).
HR Stamenov 'We need miracles' (2020) Video, loop, silent.