Spinning Lights for Color Fields

For Immediate Release (05/22/15):

AN EXHIBITION IN COLLABORATION WITH ELECTRIC WORKS, CURATED BY NOAH LANG.

Elaine Buckholtz: Spinning Light for Color Fields
A solo show
June 3-July 12, 2015
The exhibition will open on Wednesday, June 3rd with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

Elaine Buckholtz has been working with aspects of moving light for the past 30 years. This exhibition focuses on light sculpture, video installation and manipulated video stills. The works produced for this show are made up of two different, yet related, ways of working.

Firstly, the manipulated video stills—or photographic prints—from the artist’s experimentation with iconic works from art history. In the artist’s process, Buckholtz tears out images from art history books,takes the excised images and spins them on a contraption of her own design. She then films these pieces in motion while shaking the camera and the footage results in abstracted lines and patterns. The finished prints are video stills of these spun artworks.

Adding another layer to this process, Buckholtz also projects video of the spinning pieces on to prints of the video stills. These meditative, quiet pieces are the result of still images with their slow-motion counterpart video projected on to the extracted prints. The two video projections pieces in the show are formatted in the aspect ratio of two important moments in film history. The first of these, “Middlesticks,” is a 1:1 (or square) format—the format of Étienne-Jules Marey’s films, one of the earliest forms of recorded moving image. (Marey’s Chronophotographe recorded the famous images proving cats always land on their feet). The second, “Spinning Night in Living Color,” uses the iconic Cinemascope format (anywhere from 2.66:1 to 2.35:1), a format at once familiar and nostalgic (see “East of Eden”, and ”The Inn of The Sixth Happiness”). These pieces address not only the history of painting (through source material of images from textbooks), but also the history of cinema (through format and the use of moving image). Through these pieces, the act of painting is reconsidered and leapfrogs from planar painting (second dimension) to time-based media (the fourth dimension).

For Buckholtz, who is also known for her longstanding career as a light installation artist and lighting designer for performance, this body of work sits in a context of distilling the variables involved with lighting a 3D space for time-based performance into a gallery setting. The cohesive connectors between these practices are motion, light, time, and an interest in harnessing these elements in an art-historical context.

Elaine’s work combines the mediums of moving light, sound, video, and sculpture. She has shown her installations internationally in Ireland, England, Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, the Czech Republic, The Republic of Georgia, and at many galleries and installation sites in New York, along the West Coast, and in San Francisco, Ca. Elaine received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from 2002-2006 and an MFA in New Genres from Stanford University in 2006, and a subsequent MFA from California College of The Arts in 2012 . Over the past 15 years she has worked with Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk creating and recreating their visual environments internationally. In addition to her large-scale architectural installations, and Public Art projects with Nighthouse Studio, her work is represented by Electric Works in San Francisco, California and SR Contemporary Art in Boston MA. She is currently a Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts in The Studio For Interrelated Media.