Glenside, PA—December 20, 2012- Arcadia University Art Gallery (450 S. Easton Road, Glenside, PA) is pleased to announce the presentation of JG by internationally acclaimed British-born, Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean. Commissioned by and made for the gallery with funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, JG will be on view from February 7 through April 21, 2013.
JG is a sequel in technique to FILM, Dean’s 2011 project for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It is inspired by her correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) regarding connections between Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film Spiral Jetty (both works, 1970) and Ballard’s short story The Voices of Time (1960). The new 26-minute work is a looped 35mm anamorphic film shot on location in the saline landscapes of Utah and Southern California using Dean’s recently developed and patented system of aperture gate masking. A radical departure from her previous 16mm films, JG tries to respond to Ballard’s challenge, posed to her shortly before he died, that Dean should “treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve.”
Organized by Arcadia University Gallery Director Richard Torchia, the exhibition will commence with a lecture by Dean in the Great Hall of the University Commons, Thursday,Feb. 7, at 6:30 PM, and a reception in the gallery at 7:30. (Admission is free but reservations are required and can be made at arcadia.edu/tacitadean.)
JG advances Dean’s aperture gate masking invention that she developed for FILM. This labor-intensive technique allows various shapes to be exposed within a single frame, giving it the capacity to traverse time and location due to the necessity of putting the film through the camera multiple times. The process restores the spontaneity and invention that distinguished early cinema in comparison to the relative ease and the end of risk afforded by digital postproduction. The resulting simultaneity of temporal images—most of which depict a variety of salt-encrusted landscapes—invites the viewer to experience time and place in ways that parallel the effects of Ballard’s fiction and Smithson’s earthwork and film.
Among the masks used in JG is one that references the template and sprocket holes of a strip of 35mm Ektachrome slide film. Serving to explore the tension between the still and moving image that has distinguished Dean’s work from the outset, this Ektachrome mask is a reference to Ballard’s own 35mm camera, which Dean was given by Claire Walsh, the author’s longtime partner, just prior to the shoot and which is depicted in the film. The black unexposed outlines of the other masks—a range of abstract and organic forms that suggest mountain horizons, planets, pools, and Smithson’s Jetty, appear to be traced by hand. A work that could only be made using 35mm film, JG is also about drawing and collage and, as such, strives to return film to the physical, artisanal medium it was at its origin.
“Mindful of Smithson’s film of his own earthwork,” says Torchia, “as well the medium’s dependency on the spooling and looping of celluloid though camera and projector, JG proposes a matrix of visual and literary correspondences that pushes previously unimagined capacities of film. The result is a visually stunning, elliptical interpretation of a speculative conversation between Ballard, Smithson, and Dean that reaches across decades and disciplines.”
The 11-week run of JG will coincide with events and exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York. International House (3701 Chestnut St.) begins a Ballard-themed film series Tuesday, Feb. 5, at 7:00 PM, with remarks by Dean. The featured films, Ballard’s favorites chosen with the assistance of Claire Walsh, include the Russian war epic Come and See (1985) on Feb. 5, the sci-fi adventure Mad Max 2 (1981) on March 1, and film noir Point Blank (1967)onMarch 27. Together, they comprise a vision of “dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social, or environmental developments,” which is how the Collins English Dictionary defines the adjective “Ballardian.” For more information on these films, visit ihousephilly.org.
Dean’s 2008 installation Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS… (six performances, six films) will be presented at Philadelphia’sFabric Workshop and Museum (1214 Arch St.) from Feb. 2 through March 17, 2013 (fabricworkshopandmuseum.org). In New York, the Marian Goodman Gallery will present Dean’s large-scale blackboard drawing Fatigues, which Dean created for dOCUMENTA (13), from Feb. 1-March 27, 2013 (mariangoodman.com).
Additional events at the gallery will be continuing at Arcadia through the end of April, including a lecture on April 10 by V. Vale, the San Francisco-based publisher of RE/Search editions whose 1985 monograph on Ballard played a critical role in expanding the audience for the author in the 1980s. For more information on upcoming events, visit arcadia.edu/tacitadean.
JG will also be accompanied by an artist book featuring photographs Dean took on location with Ballard’s 35mm camera. These images will be joined by facsimiles of a manuscript by British novelist Will Self produced on Ballard’s typewriter, also given to him by Walsh. A second publication will include short texts by British artist and writer Jeremy Millar, Walsh, Dean and Torchia. Illustrated with stills from the film, facsimiles of Dean’s correspondence with Ballard, as well as other images contextualizing the project, the book is designed by Dean’s long-term collaborator, Martyn Ridgewell.
Gallery Hours
Tuesdays and Wednesdays: 10 AM to 5 PM
Thursdays: 10 AM to 8 PM
Fridays: 10 AM to 5 PM
Weekends: Noon to 4 PM and by appointment
For more information on JG, visit arcadia.edu/tacitadean.
About Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. She studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to live and work in Berlin in 2000. She is esteemed for her drawings, photographs, prints and sound works, as well as her artists books and texts. She is best known, however, for her films, which she began exhibiting in galleries in the mid-1990s, making her one of the first artists of her generation to dedicate herself to the medium. She is fascinated by the dynamics between the materiality of celluloid and the passage of time, which she employs in the service of narrative, however apparent or oblique, and regardless of her subjects, which include artists, anachronistic architecture and landscape. Characterized by static camera positions, long takes and ambient sound, her films are imbued by an uncanny stillness that elicits meditative forms of attention. Dean’s acute regard for light and subtle forms of motion combine to create singular evocations of sensibility and place, the spirit of the moment and the essence of film itself.
The exhibition brings Dean back to Philadelphia where the Institute of Contemporary Art was the site of her first museum survey in 1998. Subsequent solo exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2001), Schaulager, Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan (2009), and MUMOK, Vienna (2011). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and was the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009. In 2011, she made FILM as part of the Unilever Series of commissions in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Most recent exhibitions include the Norton Museum of Art, Miami, the New Museum, New York, and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012).
About Arcadia University Art Gallery
A nationally recognized venue for contemporary art in the greater Philadelphia area, Arcadia University Art Gallery (450 S. Easton Road, Glenside, PA 19038) is a 1,100-square-foot facility (housed in a 1893 power station) that has for over 30 years provided the region with a stimulating roster of individual and thematic exhibitions shaped by its mission to encourage dialogue among artists, educators, students and the general public about current visual art and its socio-cultural relevance. For more information, call 215-572-2131, visit arcadia.edu/tacitadean or email gallery [at] arcadia [dot] edu.
