The Spring/Summer Exhibitions January–August 2012 Dissolving Localities | Berkeley Jerusalem
Gale Antokal: The Spill
January 22-July 3, 2012
January 22-July 3, 2012
Emmanuel Witzthum is a composer, violist, installation artist, and lecturer who most recently served as director of The Lab (Hama’abada) in Jerusalem, a venue for experimental theater, dance, and music. He’s now here in Berkeley as a Resident Fellow at the UC’s Townsend Center for the Humanities for the Spring, 2012 semester.
Gale Antokal’s drawings are made with a mixture of volatile materials, such as chalk, powder, graphite, flour and ash. Using documentary photographs as source, she creates evocative new images that never existed in the originals. “The photos I use are now considered for their degradation and inability to be read. I enhance them making the image even more low contrast. There is a vagueness of vision and clarity. It describes a “failure of sight” on many levels. It also speaks of how the past is obscured.” Antokal’s project for The Magnes is a departure from her usual technique. Starting from drawings in her series, ‘We Are So Lightly Here’ (20032006), she will create a digital animation to be projected on a lobby wall. The drawings of milk pouring down a staircase, originally made with pastel, graphite, ash and flour, will come to life in a narrative sequence.
Dissolving Localities | Berkeley Jerusalem will extend Witzthum’s recent project that was presented in Jerusalem and Paris, in which artists were invited to “perform” the city of Jerusalem as a musical/visual instrument. By interweaving recorded sights and sounds, they created an expanding open-source multimedia montage. During his residency in Berkeley, Witzthum will build an audiovisual dialogue between Jerusalem, his hometown, and Berkeley, in an installation at the Main Gallery of The Magnes. The final result will be presented in a public program at the closing of his residency on March 15. Witzhum’s residency is made possible in collaboration with the Schusterman Family Foundation’s Visiting Artist program.
Case Study No. 1: Shaken, Not Stirred January 22-August 20, 2012 Built by Pacassa Studios, a local woodworking and architecture firm, the display cases at the very center of the new Magnes facility will be used to highlight thematic selections from the permanent collection. Every year the curators of The Magnes will collaborate with faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars in creating Case Studies from the collection, based on innovative research projects. Case Study No. 1: Shaken, Not Stirred presents art and artifacts re-discovered by staff during the move of The Magnes Collection to its new home.
A Berkeley resident, Gale Antokal is a recipient of a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is currently a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at San Jose State University. She recently exhibited her work at Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles and Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.