WOLFGANG STAEHLE opening at Postmasters on September 10

Greetings,
The new season - our twentieth - starts at Postmasters this week:

September 10 - October 16, 2004

WOLFGANG STAEHLE
2004

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of
"2004" - an exhibition of three new real time digital projections and
a new pre-recorded video by Wolfgang Staehle. The show will open
September 10 and will be on view until October 16, 2004. The opening
reception will take place Friday, September 10, between 6 and 8 pm.

"2004" will focus on the American landscape and the spectacle
of seasonal transformation. There will be three live transmissions: a
monumental vista from the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York, a
view of the grand Tetons mountain ridge from Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
and a view of the urban landscape from midtown Manhattan. The
pre-recorded video is a parallel landscape study of Niagara Falls.

Staehle's work explores the dynamics, sensations and
implications of connectivity. Using contemporary technological
resources, he creates a new understanding of landscape by taking the
next logical step in the lineage of image making: painting,
photography, film and video are now replaced by a real time digitally
transmitted image.

Staehle's interest in digital mediation of the landscape dates
back to 1999. In "Empire 24/7," he took on Warhol's celebrated 8 hour
film project. By foregrounding the transmission of the image, Staehle
replaces Warhol's excruciating monumentality of cinematic scale, with
a completely new understanding of the problem of both physical and
temporal scale. The next step in Staehle's investigations was his
justly celebrated "2001," installed at Postmasters' during the month
of September, 2001. In "2001" large-scale video projections were
transmitted from three locations around the world: the television
tower in Berlin, the medieval monastery of Comburg, and lower
Manhattan. The events of September 11 were captured, transmitted and
recorded in the fullness of their temporal and spatial context, at
the scale of a world historical event. "The towers came down in real
time and chilling slow motion, and what was intended as a form of
contemporary landscape painting became a living history painting, a
picture of history in the making." - Roberta Smith, New York Times,
Sept. 19, 2001.

In "2004," technology is forced into a kind of
self-transcendence by the simple act of utilizing the Internet as a
data pipeline. The projections give a visceral experience of
synchronicity, a silent unfolding of time itself. Non-relative terms
like "here" and "now" attain a new meaning where the literal and the
metaphorical converge. Against the grain of the frenetic networking
of the globe where anything can be experienced anywhere anytime,
Staehle offers the antidote of a reflective slowdown of beautiful
images up close and far away, static and changing at the same time.

Wolfgang Staehle, widely recognized as one of the pioneers of
internet art was born in Stuttgart in 1950 and has been living in New
York since 1976. In 1991 he founded THE THING, an independent media
project which began as a bulletin board system (BBS) and became one
of the seminal online- and offline- forums for net.art. His works
have been shown at Fondation Cartier in Paris, Gagosian Gallery in
New York, Transmediale 02 in Berlin, Wood Street Galleries in
Pittsburgh and at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. In October 2004 Staehle will participate in the "Time Zones"
exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.

Postmasters Gallery, located in Chelsea at 459 West 19th Street
(corner of 10th Avenue), is open Tuesday through Saturday to 11 - 6
pm. Please contact Magdalena Sawon at 212-727-3323 with any
questions.



–
Magdalena Sawon
Postmasters Gallery
459 W 19 Street
New York, NY 10011
phone 212 727 3323
http://www.postmastersart.com