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Conference 2008: Exhibitions

Exhibit

YOUR TOWN, INC.—Big Box Reuse with Julia Christensen

Curated by Astria Suparak
Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University

About the Exhibition

Big box buildings have increasingly dominated the American landscape since the 1960s. Author, artist, and researcher Julia Christensen spent the last six years studying these monolithic, free-standing structures and their resulting effects on our culture. In Your Town, Inc., the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University will exhibit photographs and installation work examining how communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate. Seventy-eight photographs from Christensen’s forthcoming book, Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, Fall 2008), illustrate the ways in which communities throughout the United States creatively re-employ the structures constructed and abandoned by multinational corporations, such as Wal-Mart and K-Mart. Resulting endeavors include: justice center, megachurch, senior resource center, elementary school, and flea market.

For Your Town, Inc., an architectural construction was fabricated by Christensen in collaboration with students at Oberlin College. The structure, UnBox, is a reaction and response to the big box concept. UnBox demonstrates characteristics opposed to megastore values and conventions–it is transportable, modular, built of regional and recycled materials, and easily reusable.

Furthermore, UnBox will be activated for creative and social uses, rather than retail purposes, by various groups from Greater Pittsburgh who can propose events to take place within this new facility. The building can enable discussion about urgent issues such as sustainability, user-friendliness, and reusability. Across the floor of the gallery an actual-sized parking lot will be painted to City of Pittsburgh code. The lot raises questions about the infrastructural aspect of our lifestyles–particularly, the auto-centricity of our culture.

Your Town, Inc. is an exhibition that explores the state of our built environment.

Between the photographs, building, and parking lot, the audience will be asked to think critically about how their own town has changed in light of corporate real estate. And ultimately, the question will be posed: how can you reclaim power over the design of your town’s future?

This exhibition is produced by the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon, in connection with the release of the artist’s book with MIT Press. Oberlin College has provided production assistance to the artist. The Carnegie Mellon Office of the Vice-Provost has provided assistance for the Big Box Reuse presentation.

About Julia Christensen

Christensen’s work has been featured in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, Preservation Magazine for the National Trust, and other publications; her new media, video and installation work has shown recently at the Lincoln Center, DUMBO Arts Center, and the Walker Art Center. Her book, Big Box Reuse, will be published by MIT Press this fall.

She is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Emerging Arts at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio, where she teaches in the Studio Arts and TIMARA Technology in Music and Related Arts) Departments. She has also taught at Stanford University and California College of the Arts, among other universities.

Areas of interest:

• Architecture: Urban Planning, Landscape Architecture
• Art: Photo, Sculpture
• Design
• Environmental Studies
• Humanities: American Studies, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture

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Student Exhibition

Ashley Peel Pinkham
Assistant Director, The Print Center
Philadelphia, PA.

Juror’s Statement:

The theme of this conference, TECHNOCRACY: image production / distribution / consumption, can be interpreted in many different ways and the entries submitted by over 50 students reflects just that. In the 38 images by 20 artists selected for exhibition, the fight between Techno–lust vs. Technophobia was quite evident: from traditional B/W prints like Joseph Molieri’s landscapes and Maggie McAllister Thompson’s documentary photos to Victor Rivera’s images with text taken from found obituaries which push the boundaries of photography’s very definition.

Kerry Kolenut’s color photographs seem like everyday domestic images at first glance until you realize all of the subjects are vacantly starring at television screens that are off camera. As technology has progressed, ‘tuning out’ has become the norm and artists are compelled to document this phenomenon.

Hannah Hodge’s Trapped in Technology depicts a young boy sitting on a chair in his backyard with cords wrapped around him, tuned into multiple headphones, changing a song on his mp3 player while being televised and then captured on camera. The overwhelming layers of this image reflect society’s new norm of virtual consumption and how artists are documenting and adapting to this frenzy.

Even the way jurors view submissions has changed in the last decade—moving away from seeing physical matted prints in person or slides projected on a screen to viewing a computer screen with tiny little digital images as attachments. The medium of each entry has been removed from the equation as well. You don’t know if you are looking at a gum bichromate print or a digital remake of what a gum bichromate looks like. Is this a gelatin silver print from a 4x5’ negative or an inkjet print from a digital point and shoot?

Perhaps we should move away from defining artists as a ‘photographer’ or ‘painter’ or ‘sculptor’. Instead start defining artists as ‘artists’ and not get hung up on what materials or equipment they use rather at what they have created as an end product. Whether an artist uses photography, paint, clay, found images or a computer program, all of these should be considered just another tool in the artist’s ever evolving bag.

Artists have always been the trendsetters and change the way we view the world. Through new imaging technology (camera phones, webcams, photo and video blogs, etc.), let’s sit back and watch how these new technologies are used by artists to create work that would have been never possible before.

Congratulations to all who entered and put your work forward and congratulations to those who are in the exhibition. Special thank you to Colette Copeland, Scott McMahon and the SPE-MA board for inviting me to jury this exhibition. Tune in and enjoy the show!

Artists:

SCHOLARSHIP WINNERS

• Adjunct: Karen Rodewald, University of Pennsylvania
• Graduates: James R. Southard, Carnegie MellonUniversity; Gwynneth VanLaven, George Mason University
• Undergraduates: Cassie Brennan, University of the Arts; Joseph Molieri, University of the Arts