The Tools of Culture @ Koscielak Gallery

KOSCIELAK GALLERY PROUDLY PRESENTS:

THE TOOLS OF CULTURE

A collaborative exhibition featuring

Marcin Berdyszak (Poznan/Poland), Scott Kildall (San Francisco), Patrick Lichty (Chicago) and Second Front.

As part of Chicago October Artists’ Month themed celebration, “Creative Alliances,” THE TOOLS OF CULTURE reflects on contemporary culture, technology, the media and its impact on how our identities are constructed. The exhibiting artists’ differing perspectives, as being European or American, create an interesting dialogue and examine the various ways we can interpret and view our contemporary digital culture. The viewer walks away questioning the difference between public and private space as well as the differences between personal and national identities and locations

OPENING RECEPTION:
Friday, October 5th, 2007 5 - 10 p.m.
Artists: Marcin Berdyszak, Scott Kildall and Patrick Lichty will make a special appearance at the opening.

GALLERY TOUR:
Saturday, October 13, 2007 6 -10 p.m.


MARCIN BERDYSZAK’S sculptural installation Constitution is a reconstruction of a room in his house in Poland filled with the United European symbols. Creating a space of contradictions between new and old realities in Europe, his works are not connected with the dialogue of material space because their real space is time. The artist, though he creates the objects that are intuitively connected with such notions as sculpture or object, much more often refers to the tradition of painting.


SCOTT KILDALL’s Uncertain Location, 2007, is a video/print installation. In the summer of 2006, NASA announced that the tapes documenting the Apollo 11 moon landing were missing. The video broadcast on television was transmitted through space and then shot off a video monitor from Houston Ground Control, though no one has seen then this footage.

Using rented space suits from a prop house in Hollywood, Uncertain Location recreates a 1-minute segment from the original moonwalk on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. With the spacecraft in the background, two astronauts attempt to raise the American flag. Each exhibition of this video is also a takeaway print performance, and a series of prints have been made from the frames of the video. At the opening a representative will give away the prints to the public. As they walk away with the images, the corresponding frames are scrubbed from the recreated video.

PATRICK LICHTY debuts Technical Difficulties, a series of recent and never before seen objects, videos, and print works that probe the boundaries between art history and digital culture. These include Child Worker Shoes/NikeID (From Filterhack), La Cage aux Folles, Northern Deep-Fried Paik, and Valise in an IPod, all of which play with the concept of the readymade in the era of DIY (Do-it-Yourself) culture.

These works incorporate created shoes that criticize the use of child labor, the hacking of childhood detritus with live video generators and through the portable media artist’s “Museum.”
Print works will also refer to historical traces through Lichty’s New Masterwork Proofs made from interventions in the online virtual world, Second Life. Throughout his work, Lichty plays with identity, materiality, and historical context in terms of a digital culture that makes all these recently non-negotiable concepts highly malleable.

Second Front will present COREDUMP, video selections from their recent video anthology, Second Front’s First Second DVD. Shown on dual video monitors, these displays will create a dialogue between pieces chronicling the group’s virtual performances over the past year.

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For more info on these artists or for press ready images, please contact:
Gosia Koscielak at [email protected]
or
Joanne Schneck at [email protected]


Koscielak Galleries
1646 N. Bosworth Ave
Chicago, IL 60622
T.847.858.1540
http://www.gosiakoscielak.com