The AC Institute Presents Four New Exhibitions

Works by Joseph Farbrook, Michael Georgetti, Jonathon Keats and the Kit Collaboration with Robert Suacier.
Opening Reception May 12, 2011 from 6 - 8PM

QUANTUM
ENTANGLEMENTS - by Jonathon Keats
With
five millennia of history, and a plethora of religious and civil ceremonies,
marriage is a popular means of producing families. Yet matrimony isn't the only
method of uniting people, nor even is it the most effective technique. Modern
science suggests a far more profound alternative, one that does not operate by
religious tradition or civil mandate, but rather bonds couples by a law of
nature: quantum entanglement.
According
to quantum mechanics, when two or more particles are entangled, they behave as
if they were one and the same. Any change to one instantaneously and
identically changes those entangled with it even if they're a universe apart.
While the phenomenon has been applied to fields such as military encryption,
Jonathon Keats has put entanglement to work for the more worthy purpose of
fostering human relations.
The
technology is straightforward: Exposed to solar radiation, a nonlinear crystal
entangles photons. Pairs of entangled photons are divided by prisms. The
photoelectric effect translates their entangled state to the bodies of a couple
who wish to be united, entangling them in a quantum wedding.
There
are no restrictions on who may be entangled to whom. The process is
unsupervised. No records are kept. Even those who get entangled will have to
take their entanglement on faith, as any attempt to measure a quantum system
disentangles it: A quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism
about it.
The
potential of quantum marriage will be fulfilled by those who choose to engage
it. After five thousand years of manmade laws, often exclusionary or punitive,
science promises to liberate marriage through technology freely offering
entanglement to everybody.
 
Strata-Caster –
by Joseph Farbrook
Scantly a generation ago, moving image screens were
restricted to television and cinema and the content was nearly exclusively
generated by corporations and conglomerates that dictated the form and
aesthetic of what should and should not be seen by the masses.   The content was restricted almost entirely
to news and entertainment and limited in scope to what could be sold as a
commodity. 
Presently, technological advances have given moving image
screens an explosion of new forms and possibilities of content.   Adding up the hours we spend staring into
screens, it could be argued that we are seeing an ever-greater part of our
lives mediated by this device.   Virtual
Reality has quietly emerged on this side of the screen and embedded itself into
our psyches.  The collective imagination
is to an ever-greater extent being co-opted and aligning itself to the
operational workings of this new prosthetic.  
It is now a critical time for artists to temper this overwhelming
involvement and offer insights into this reality, complete with new paradigms
of perception, new ways of seeing into, and through, the ubiquitous
screen.  
“Strata-Caster” is an installation that explores the
topography of power, prestige, and position.  
It exists in the virtual world of Second Life, a place populated by
approximately 50,000 people at any given moment. Although virtual and infinite,
it continues to mirror the physical world, complete with representations of
prestige and exclusivity. Even without the limitations of the physical, why are
borders and separation still prized so highly? 
Entry into this installation is by wheelchair, an unfamiliar interface
to the limitless expanse of virtual space, but one that continuously calls
attention to limitation and position.

THE
DUTY FREE SHOP IS ON THE 3RD FLOOR AS YOU PASS THROUGH THE EYE OF
THE NEEDLE. – by Michael Georgetti
Materials used: Paraffin wax, ply wood, industrial
pine, halogen light, tape, elastic cord, glitter, plastic toy soldiers,
floating devices, rope, paint strippers, hair dryers, indoor heaters,
fluorescent light and skipping rope, dimensions variable, 2011
Artist
Statement:
I
make installations and sculptures that usually move or fall apart. Using a
combination of painting, kinetics and found objects these structures are made
with an emphasis on poetics, play and deconstruction in order to create
precarious relationships between ephemeral sculpture and the everyday world.
These
sculptures often collapse to imitate the way things don’t work or inevitably
fall apart. Engine parts and electric machines are dismantled and
re-coordinated to create relationships between inanimate objects and social
behavior.
These
constructions are often dysfunctional and usually border on being precarious.
In
their making, tape, rope, elastic cord and cling-wrap are used as bandages and
stabilizing devices. In this sense, a relationship between repairing and
constructing occurs where these works become provisional. Often they appear
anthropomorphic because they manifest from ideas that have personalities.
A
broad range of commercial and industrial materials are deployed in these
structures: bathtubs, tennis balls, arrows, electric toy cars, paint, cement,
hockey sticks, pool cues, crack pipes, wax, yoga mats, garment steamers, hair
dryers, alcohol, water and portable swimming pools.
These
materials are chosen for the way they can mimic human behavior and expose the
materiality of the world we construct around us.
In a
gallery context I set up scenarios that have a short-durational quality in
order to create readings of the way people deal with impermanence. But often
these ideas manifest in a slapstick and humorous way to generate experiences of
absurdity and the imperfect nature of human behavior.
Short
description of artist practice:
Through painting, sculpture, installation and film,
Georgetti explores the duality of behaviour and technology; the way thoughts
and feelings manifest within the mechanical and constructed environments we
create around us.

Virutorium – by
the Kit Collaboration and Robert Saucier
Virutorium is
the second joint project by The Kit Collaboration + Robert Saucier. Their first
project named Infrasense was a
large-scale sound installation that toured 11 galleries in Canada, UK, USA and
Belgium between 2004 to 2006 and dealt with the cultural economy of paranoia
surrounding the word ‘virus’ in its biological (sexual), computational (coding)
and capital (marketing) forms. Virutorium
is an interactive robotic sound installation, a kinetic and aural work that
advances themes originated in the Infrasense
project. This new project explores the extensive and pervasive cultural
dynamics of the ‘virus’ and seeks to highlight how far viral systems and models
are influencing bodily and computer based communication systems, modes of
capitalism and socio-sexual relations, ultimately contemplating how we
construct cultural memories about transient entities that we consider
detrimental to our livelihoods.