Atopia Projects - GEEP Participants

GEEP

PARTICIPANTS:

BIRGIR ANDRÉSSON's work explores the relationship between visual perception and spoken language. The series BUILD (2005–) consists of regular cardboard packing boxes that have been cut to remove all the text and logos. The edited forms, with cut out rectangular apertures, are reminiscent of architectural models. The genesis of the work is a childhood experience where Andrésson tried to help a partially sighted family friend compose a letter using typography cut from such boxes.

PETRA BAUER AND ANETTE KRAUSS' collaborative work, In search of a tool for life, is a small pamphlet which contains a collection of anecdotes that describing rebellion that manipulate social practices and situations for personal ends.

SABINE BITTER, JEFF DERKSEN & HELMUT WEBER work collaboratively on "Global-Urban Research." Their inaugural project as a collective was shown in GEEP. The Democracy Paradox! is an animated sequence of still images of Caracas, Venezuela with overlaid textual descriptions/propositions. The theorist Samuel Huntington defines "democracy paradox" as the "adoption by non-Western societies of Western democratic institutions encourages and gives access to power to nativist and anti-Western political movements."

CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE was established in 1986 and consists of 5 artists based in the USA. Their collaborative practice explores the boundaries of art, science, technology and biology to interrogate such issues as the political intent or importance of contemporary bio-tech practices, and the use of genetic modification in crop production.

JOHN GIGLIO's drawings suggest a propositional and unstable notion of architecture as a system that is oriented, structured and revised by human re-imagining, intervention and performance. In the drawings, bodies wield leverage against tree limbs to perform landscape architecture; inhabited buildings are freed from the restrictions of walls and floors; new urban landscapes are made as planes settle and spatially intersect with skyscrapers; buildings and furniture become apparel that can be worn.

ANDREW JONES is an interior architect and furniture designer. His projects subtly reorient familiar objects, forms and materials to produce visual and functional discord: dinner-plates and tea-cups used as lampshades, an upturned white, paper lunch bag that shades a light bulb while also casting a surprisingly luminous color on the adjacent wall. The Globe and Mail newspaper, Toronto, listed Jones as ?one of eight young Canadians who will carry us into the next century?. Included in GEEP is a prototype for a light-fixture, in which an elemental but disjunctive relationship is constructed between the form of the fixture and the form of the bulb itself.

LUCKY LEONE is an artist who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. A graduate of RISD and San Diego State, he teaches at the university level in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He assures us that his dental fillings receive only easy listening stations, thus legitimizing the voices that only he hears.

ROBIN RIMBAUD (SCANNER) & KATARINA MATIASEK have collaborated since 1997. Their installations typically involve upsetting and unravelling relationships between visual and audio components. Included in GEEP is the work DIVA (2004), a video project which manipulates image and audio from a documentary on Maria Callas to create a stretching and compressing of the singer’s voice as it draws to the end of a performance. The visual image is affected to appear as though the camera is exiting Callas’ mouth.

PIA RÖNICKE utilizes animation to montage actual, imagined and modified architectural forms within evolving landscapes. The work exists as a progression of speculative and provisional architectural renderings that simultaneously subvert the idealism of modernism. Through fluid camera pans a relentless progression is punctuated by occasional juxtaposing of unlikely or impossible architectural forms.

JOHN SPARAGANA hand-fatigues and re-photographs magazine pages. The glossy, encapsulated fashion advertisements accumulate consequence as the body’s image becomes damaged, and the model’s figure exists within and beside the faded, creased, distressed materiality of the page. The series at once preys upon the circulated, un-proclaimed materiality of fashion, while documenting and re-encapsulating its erosion and altered substance.

TERCERUNQUINTO is an art/architecture collective founded in 1996, consisting of Julio Castro, Gabriel Cazares, and Rolando Flores (based in Monterrey and Mexico City). Tercerunquinto’s work primarily deals with architecture as a means of context and disjunction in the social sphere. Most recently they converted a Mexican museum into a warehouse for street vendors and in 2003 they created a concrete platform in the slums of Monterrey as means to facilitate a variety of cultural and social interactions.