Apr 25 – May 31. Opening April 25 (7-9pm)
Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery
38 Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211
718-387-9818
Dam, Stuhltrager partners with St. Petersburg Art Project to forge new frontiers and find common ground in New Media. Russian artist, Anna Frants’ media installations are total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound. Her work employs state-of-the-art technologies and is distinguished by precision and direct simplicity.
IN THE SHADE OF AN OLIVE TREE
new installation
by Anna Frants
“The space penetrates the space.”
Vladimir Vasilievich Sterligov
Just as her Sterligovite predecessors conceptually redefined space in paint, Russian artist Anna Frants utilizes video and audio to reconfigure a viewer’s reality…
IN THE SHADE OF AN OLIVE TREE Leaves rustle in wind that is not there. Chirping fills the air from birds that have flown farther than could possibly be heard. The seemingly straight forward pleasures of a sunny day spent “In the Shade of An Olive Tree” provides playful fodder for Frant’s interactive installation.
The logic ingrained in how one distinguishes a common setting such as a tree in the sun’s rays is skewed. Video and sound are utilized to manipulate light, contrast, touch and “reversity” within the installation, producing an environment where nothing is rationally as it is naturally perceived. As spectators enter the frame of projected light- he/she participates in the creation of an image and is transported, on the associative level, to a suggested world by inference.
(Dedicated to Nina Zakharovna Kunina)
FUR DIE STADT (for the city)
new installation
by Anna Frants
The effect of listening to Beethoven is want to
“…tell people sweet stupid things and caress their heads
instead of smashing in those heads mercilessly…”
Lenin
Lenin stated that he could not listen to Beethoven’s sonata because if he did he would never finish the revolution. In Frant’s Für die Stadt, hungry foot soldiers fight in a videotaped dance for survival to “Moonlight Sonata”…
FUR DIE STADT (for the city) Pigeons foraging in cold snow of St Petersburg this past winter migrate all the way to New York for spring. Anna Frants’ multimedia installations of Russian city street pigeons scavenging for food have landed on both sides of the East River. Undeterred by the bustling public street around them, Frants video/sound projections of feathered city inhabitants go about their business in the front window of Dam Stuhltrager Gallery in Brooklyn at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan.
Connecting life as an artist in Russia and in America, Frant’s video is set in a frozen, harsh and unforgiving setting where occupants are filmed amidst routine of working hard to find and claim their daily bread. Among the crowd, one bird has notably different movements and it becomes clear he/she is sick or injured. Set to Beethoven’s Sonata, the impeded pigeon is the weakest in the bunch but nonetheless uniquely different, and thus rises as the star.
“First, there is a great rush to be different.
On the other hand, they are all just a pigeon trying to eat.”
Anna Frants
Ryan Wolfe finally returns to Dam, Stuhltrager after response to his debut at the gallery sent him exhibiting across the world for two years. Wolfe’s “Sketch of a Field of Grass” travelled from Brooklyn to Miami, NYC, Chicago, Indianapolis, Newark, Istanbul, Washington DC, Wiesbaden and Chattanooga- leaving a trail of rave reviews and fans stretching across the globe. Before shipping off to Basel… And then Russia… Ryan Wolfe comes back to Brooklyn poised to jump on the whirlwind his new project sets in motion.
BRANCHING SYSTEM (butterfly hurricane)
new installation
by Ryan Wolfe
“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Edward Lorenz
An installation inspired by the theories of Edward Lorenz opens one week after his death. This one man’s giant impact on contemporary thinking leaves everything after him forever changed…
BRANCHING SYSTEM (butterfly hurricane) Masses of robotic leaves flutter like butterflies, transforming the gallery space into a jungle-like network of complex, serendipitous motion. Individual viewers have an impact on this motion, and their physical interactions with the piece ripple out across the network like wind.
Branching Systems (butterfly hurricane) is an interactive installation exploring Lorenz’s famous “butterfly effect” which signalled the beginnings of modern Chaos Theory. It tangibly reimagines cause and effect wrapped into a single moment, and demonstrates how small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamic system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.
STUDY FOR LIT FROM WITHIN
new installation
by Ryan Wolfe
(with special thanks to Allison Kudla)
“As individuals, what do we not get from the outside world
that we must find within to sustain ourselves?”
Ryan Wolfe
The technological and biological merge to create a unique hybrid living system which inverts the fundamental biological relationship between inside and outside…
STUDY FOR LIT FROM WITHIN In a sun-less room, plants thrive using light that emanates from within their own living tissue. Ryan Wolfe’s newest installation redefines how a living form can relate to its environment.
Clusters of Equisetum Hyemale (Common Horsetail) are equipped with the equivalent of internal sunshine. staggered throughout a dark room, each plant contains a number of surgically-embedded LEDs. These LEDs have been selected to enable the plants to photosynthesize in darkness. Sunrise and sunset programmatically occur from within each plant, allowing the viewer to navigate a field of organisms flourishing off their own internal sun cycle.
Wolfe’s installation reminds us how modern advances increasingly reconfigure lives while offering an imaginative glimpse of the future of this intertwining.
Additional thanks to: Mercedes Wolfe, Sally Deidun, Mark Esper, Lilly Cohen, Devrim Kadirbeyoglu, Edith Kollath