Van McElwee: Slices of a River

VAN McELWEE SLICES OF A RIVER

bruno david gallery

VAN McELWEE: Slices of a River May 14 - July 27, 2009

Bruno David Gallery 3721 Washington Boulevard Saint Louis, Missouri 63108 U.S.A. info@brunodavidgallery.com www.brunodavidgallery.com Director: Bruno L. David This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition VAN McELWEE: Alternity: A Figure in Manifold Space Editor: Bruno L. David Catalog Designer: Yoko Kiyoi Design Assistant: Claudia R. David Printed in USA All works courtesy of Bruno David Gallery and Van McElwee Cover Image: Diagonal Drift #1, 2008 - 09, ink on paper, 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm), Edition of 5.

Copyright Š 2009 Bruno David Gallery, Inc. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of Bruno David Gallery, Inc.

Contents

Preface by Van McElwee Essay by David Bonetti Afterword by Bruno L. David Checklist of the Exhibition Biography

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Preface by Van McElwee 2

Time is embedded in a video still.

Like a mental image its past and future are imaginary, fanning out into infinite possibilities.

A video still is a slice of a river, open to contemplation; an end in itself.

—Van McElwee

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Essay by David Bonetti 4

In his videos and the stills he extracts from them, Van McElwee seems to be primarily interested in abstraction – the underlying patterns of line, form and color that structure vision. But McElwee is as much interested in the world in all of its manifestations as it appears immediately to the eye as he is in formal reduction. Mardi Gras parades, Japanese temples, the arcades of a hotel in the tropics, a bustling nighttime market in Cairo, a slow cruise down suburban St. Louis strips lined with interchangeable fast food emporia and gas stations, the delirium of carnival rides at night are among the raw material that captures his imagination and sources his transformations.

Which is not to deny that, as an artist, McElwee is intimately invested in transformation. His images are layered, digitized – abstracted. The parade images from his “Procession” series are about energy fields, waves of sensation, as much as they are about the ranked majorettes with their batons and the men in striped vests and bowler hats. The images culled from his suburban St. Louis tour are surreal – Steak n Shake, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Shell, Bank of America, Ford, Subaru and VW franchises bulge and morph in a hallucinatory vision. The images drawn from “Alternity” suggest alternative ways of seeing. People walking across a field eventually become fields of people.

In his work, McElwee suggests that we don’t use our visual capabilities to their full extent. Of course, if, along with everyone else, we did, it would be difficult if not impossible to negotiate the world on a daily basis. There’d be lots of crashes along those mini mall-lined strips. But that’s what we have artists for – to go where we cannot and report the news they discover back to us.

—David Bonetti David Bonetti has written as staff art critic for the Boston Phoenix, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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Afterword by Bruno L. David 6

I am pleased to exhibit a video by Van McElwee at the Bruno David Gallery. Support for the creation of significant new works of art has been the core to the mission and program of the Bruno David Gallery since its founding. Van McElwee’s remarkable and compelling work makes him one the most impressive artist of the gallery.

“Alternity: A Figure in Manifold Space,” a single channel, 6:48 minute video created in 2008 expands the vanishing point of linear perspective into a plane, allowing all potential events at that point to mingle freely on the surface of the screen. Figures and sounds merge, blend, shift, and flow through one another in time and space, creating what McElwee calls a “spongespace of possibilities.” McElwee, currently a professor of Electronic and Photographic Media at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, creates non-narrative videos that combine images extracted from the real world with textured music, and culminate in the viewer’s experience and interpretation of the piece. McElwee explains: “I find inspiration in noise, in nature, in fake things, in ruins and construction sites, in overlapping sounds, and in concepts that I barely understand. I’ve always been preoccupied with form, not as opposed to content, but in relation to formlessness, an idea I owe to the East.” McElwee is now creating a series of still prints extracted from the video, thus further abstracting the forms and color that structure vision.

McElwee sees the video still as “a slice of a river, open to contemplation; an end in itself.”

McElwee earned his B.F.A. in printmaking from the Memphis College of Arts, and his M.F.A. in Multimedia at the Washington University in Saint Louis School of Fine Arts. He has received many grants, fellowships, awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Independent Production Fund, and numerous nominations for the Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship, most recently in 2005.

—Bruno L. David

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Checklist of the Exhibition and Images

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Alternity #2, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 10

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Alternity #3, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 12

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Alternity #4, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 14

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Aperspectival House, 2008 - 09 Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 16

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Diagonal Drift #1, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 18

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Diagonal Drift #2, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 20

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Diagonal Drift #3, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 22

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Hyperplasm #2, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 24

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Hyperplasm #7, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 26

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Paris 1, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 28

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Paris 8, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 30

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Paris 9, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 32

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Paris 12, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 34

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Procession #3, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 36

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Procession #7, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 38

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Procession #8, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 40

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Procession #9, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 42

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Procession #10, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 44

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Radio 1, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 46

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Radio 2, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 48

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Radio 4, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 50

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Space Splice #1, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 52

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Space Splice #3, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 54

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Space Splice #4, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 56

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Space Splice #5, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 58

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Space Splice #9, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 60

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Space Splice #27, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 62

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Transfinite Loops, 2008 - 09

Ink on paper 24 x 32 inches (60.96 x 81.28 cm) Edition of 5 64

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Biography 66

VAN McELWEE Van McElwee’s body of work encompasses over forty video installations and single channel works.

SELECTED ONE-PERSON SHOWS AND INSTALLATIONS include: Anthology Film Archives, New York City, The Kitchen, New York City, The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Art, China, a retrospective and six installations at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Galerie Trabant, Austria, a twenty-five year retrospective at St. Louis University Museum of Art, Thread Waxing Space, New York, a ten-year survey at Rencontres Video Art Plastique in France; Argos Gallery in Belgium; two one-person shows at Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive, California; a Virginia Museum of Art touring exhibition, The Marsh Gallery at the University of Richmond, Virginia; Medienwerkstatt in Vienna; a video wall at the Continental Insurance Building, New York, Citicorp Center, New York, Ohio University Gallery of Art, Athens; Artist’s Television Access, San Francisco and a commissioned installation for the COSI Museum in Columbus, Ohio.

SELECTED GROUP SHOWS AND FESTIVALS include: Paula Cooper Gallery New York for the NAP Video Biennial, The Long Beach Museum of Art, Ars Electronica, ZKM, Siggraph, Camden Arts Centre, UK, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Wexner Center for the Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum, New York Video Festival, Berlin Film Festival, London Film Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, Experimental Intermedia, New York, Worldwide Video Festival at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Impakt, Videonale, Bonn, Black Maria Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Artpool, Budapest, Montevideo, Amsterdam, an installation at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Art in General, New York, Onion City Film Festival, Digital Dance Festival, Seoul, Korea, The New York Expo, The Biennial of Media and Architecture, Graz, Austria, a video wall at the Dallas Museum of Art for the Dallas Video Festival; an Installation at The International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Montreal; an installation at F.A U.S.T. in France; an installation at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France, for the Lille International Film Festival, and installations at international art fairs in London, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Zurich.

Broadcasts include the United States, Germany, Switzerland, France and Brazil.

GRANTS AND AWARDS include: The American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award; Seven Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Independent Production Fund; a travel grant from the Government of India and two production grants from Media Arts in Missouri. McElwee was Artist-inResidence at the Experimental Television Center, Owego, New York.

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OTHER AWARDS include: the Grand Prize at the New Arts Program Biennial, the Experimental Video Award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival; Director’s Choice Award from the Black Maria Festival; Award of Excellence, Award of Recognition, and the Wendy Hearn Invitational Award, from the Missouri Video Festival; Award of Merit from the Sinking Creek Festival; Honorable Mention at Film+Arc in Austria; a Jury Award from the New York Expo and the Center for New Television Consulting Award, three research grants from Webster University in St. Louis and a commission from the New Music Circle, St. Louis, MO for “Van McElwee and Friends” at the St. Louis Art Museum.

NOMINATIONS include: The International Award for Media Art (seven nominations,) sponsored by ZKM & SWR Television in Germany; The Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Fellowship(1994), The Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2002, 2003 2004and 2005).

McElwee’s work is represented by Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, The Kitchen in New York, Heure Exquise! in France, Inter Media Art Institute in Germany, LUX in the United Kingdom and Galerie Trabant, Austria. McElwee’s works are archived in numerous international collections.

EDUCATION: MFA in Multimedia 1978, Washington University School of Art; Merit Scholarship; studied with electronic music composer Tom Hamilton and sound and light pioneer Howard Jones.

BFA in Printmaking 1973, Memphis College of Art. Van McElwee is Professor of Electronic and Photographic Media at Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri.

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ARTISTS Margaret Adams Dickson Beall Laura Beard Elaine Blatt Martin Brief Lisa K. Blatt Shawn Burkard Bunny Burson Carmon Colangelo Alex Couwenberg Jill Downen Yvette Drury Dubinsky Corey Escoto

Beverly Fishman Damon Freed William Griffin Joan Hall Takashi Horisaki Kim Humphries Kelley Johnson Howard Jones (Estate) Chris Kahler Bill Kohn (Estate) Leslie Laskey Sandra Marchewa Peter Marcus

Patricia Olynyk Robert Pettus Daniel Raedeke Chris Rubin de la Borbolla Frank Schwaiger Charles Schwall Christina Shmigel Thomas Sleet Buzz Spector Lindsey Stouffer Cindy Tower Mario Trejo Ken Worley

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