[spectre] grey) (area: Sarah Cook presents Marina Zurkow: Elixir III

[Darko Fritz]

grey) (area - space of contemporary and media art, Korcula, Croatia



11 – 27 . 8

opening Wednesday August  11 . 21 - 23 h

Guest curator Sarah Cook (UK / Canada):

Marina Zurkow (USA): Elixir III (from the Elixir Series 2007-2009)

single channel animation



Elixir III is one of a series of four single channel animations by  
Marina Zurkow which encapsulate human endeavour relative to the  
sublime forces of the oceans and skies. A single cut crystal decanter  
bobs and spins in a watery seascape reminiscent of a Romantic  
painting, while the weather turns overhead. In each animation a line- 
drawn figure appears inside the bottle, striving in a repetitive  
action: rowing, diving, stumbling. In Elixir III, a young woman flaps  
her arms which are tied to paper wings, but never lifts into the air.  
The artist cites the influence of the paintings of waves and swells by  
Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) yet the images read  
contemporaneously, drawn from modern day sources such as media  
coverage of dramatic weather events or holiday videos uploaded to the  
web, then rotoscoped by hand, frame by frame. Rain appears to splatter  
the screen, reminding us that we too are watching through a glassy  
surface.

Zurkow has made work on the theme of flooding and climate change in  
other forms, for a network of CCTV screens in a convention centre  
built adjacent to highway overpasses and a river prone to flooding,  
and for a panoramic site-specific projection on the side of a car  
parking lot in a US Gulf state. Here her work Elixir III is shown rear- 
projected, on a loop, in the doorway of a villa on the Croatian island  
of Korcula facing out to the water, with a haunting soundtrack by Pat  
Irwin. Churning away, the weather within the bottle (volcanic ash  
induced red sunsets and wind storms) manifests as a kind of instable  
magical potion, while the figure’s actions appear to act like a  
dynamo or combustion agent, although it seems there is nothing they  
alone can do to release this potion in order to change the state of  
the seas beyond the beautiful bottle in which they are trapped (it is  
said that even the ancient Greeks used oil, drop by drop, to calm a  
stormy sea for safe passage). This apparition of a vial of elixir, for  
our current environmental troubles, or in response to our subconscious  
desire for a medicine to induce forgetting, is all the more  
tantalizing at a time when we are inescapably conscious of what our  
effect our actions have on the waters that surround us.

The entire Elixir Series is showing simultaneously at Catherine Clark  
Gallery in San Francisco from July 10 to August  21, 2010.

- - -

Marina Zurkow (based in Brooklyn, NY) makes psychological narratives  
about humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the  
weather. Her work  includes multi-channel videos, customized multi- 
screen computer pieces, animated cartoons, interactive mobile works,  
and pop objects. She has undertaken residencies at Eyebeam in New  
York, Isis Arts in Newcastle and the Banff Centre in Canada, and has  
been commissioned to make new work for and exhibited internationally  
at FACT (Liverpool), FutureEverything (Manchester), SIGGRAPH, The  
Sundance Film Festival, ISEA 2006 / 01SJ Biennial (San Jose), Media  
City at the Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Ars Electronica,  
Rhizome, The Rotterdam Film Festival, Res Fest, Creative Time, The  
Kitchen, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The National  
Museum for Women in the Arts, and at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery. In 2003  
she was awarded a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship and in 2001 a  
Creative Capital grant. Marina Zurkow teaches on New York University's  
Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

http://www.o-matic.com

- - -

Sarah Cook is curator (of contemporary art)
  and editor/researcher/cofounder of CRUMB the resource for curators  
of media art
  at the University of Sunderland. She is coauthor of Rethinking  
Curating (MIT Press, 2010), a trustee of folly in Lancaster
  and was the inaugural curatorial fellow at Eyebeam in New York in  
2008.

- - -

open daily 21 - 22 h or by appointment . free entrance

gallery: Put sv. Nikole 7 . Korcula

mail: po box 95 . 20260 Korcula . Croatia

contact: Darko Fritz . darko at darkofritz.net . tel: + 385 91 5800193

http://www.grey-area.org

----

gray) (area presents works of contemporary and media art with a focus  
on those that fill the gap between these two art worlds and  
discourses. Preferable are programs that shift the media and skip the  
frame of simple definitions and interpretations. gray) (area operates  
from the city of Korcula on Korcula island in Croatia, enjoying the  
free position of the cultural periphery and the challenge of having no  
context of either contemporary or media art within the close  
neighborhood. The periphery provides freedom from established cultural  
power-games, fashionable keywords, double criteria [that depends on  
the geo-political position of the art-producer] and other positions of  
predictability that are part of an artist's reputation building system  
in relation to the cultural industries, present even within small  
media art circles.