AIM 24-Artists in the Market Place
Bronx Museum of the Arts
Author: Julia P. Herzberg
ArtNexus No. 54 - Oct 2004
|  | The Bronx Museum of the Arts presented AIM 24 (Artist in the Marketplace), a model project and juried exhibition for emerging artists whose work was selected on the basis of its originality and quality.1 The thirty-six artists (chosen from a group of 800) received training from specialists who provide professional guidance on practical concerns such as curatorial methods, copyright laws, and exhibition and public art opportunities. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the AIM program represents the museum’s ongoing commitment to support emerging artists in the metropolitan area.
Opening night was filled with an air of excitement and anticipation: one wondered who among the group might achieve the critical status of such former AIM fellows as Glenn Ligon (1984), Tomie Arai (1985), Polly Apfelbaum (1986), Fabian Marcaccio 1988), Byron Kim (1990), or Valeska Soares (1993).
Despite the diversity of mediums, formal languages, and investigative processes, most of the artists find their subjects in the spaces between art and life; common points of departure are everyday objects, activities, and events. The resulting artistic responses suggest the endless ways the imagination works when given full rein.
For N.Y. Times Headlines A. J. Bocchino excised the main headline from the front page of the Times every day for fourteen years. The resulting composition of headlines, run together chronologically and color-coded according to subject matter, become an index of what the media considered the most important events of the day. David McQueen addressed highly publicized media incidents in a different mode in his series The Stocks Project (2003), which features digital prints of images of stocks of corporations that had sustained significant financial losses as a result of corporate fraud—Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom.
The importance of place for defining the subject is central to many artists in AIM 24, including Phillip Buehler, Gina Fuentes Walker, Karla Roberts, Valerie Hegarty, and Liza McConnell. Buehler took hundreds of shots of the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, which was closed twenty-five years ago due to budgetary cuts. Approaching the project as if it were an archeological ruin, the artist printed two long-distance shots: one taken in the morning and another after clearing accumulated layers of dust from the volleyball court in a ritualistic, performative manner. The still-bright colors of the peeling walls evoke a strange mix of forlorn abandonment and absence. Gina Fuentes Walker’s triptych from the Neon Series features interior views of nondescript commercial spaces. Neon Skylight, for example, captures, from a radically untitled angle, a partial view of a skylight with long fluorescent lights receding in the space. The green lights, photographed with a film that reveals different hues of contrasting color temperatures, create a surreal, abstract image. Karla Roberts (Billboard, View #2) photographed trees in the countryside behind a billboard whose images are aligned with the gaze of the viewer passing by, so that the spectator perceives the trees on the billboard as if they were in the actual landscape, creating confusion between the real, and what is perceived as real. Valerie Hegarty recreated a corner of her studio in paper, mimicking the design of the floorboards, wallpaper, and the wall where her old-fashioned sink is installed. Fragments of the sink strewn across the floor invite the spectator to imagine the configuration of the original space. Liza McConnell’s Landscape Painting was installed in a darkened supply room off a main gallery. The mixed-media installation has a surreal, Matta-like feel. Greeted by a menthol fragrance upon entering the room, the spectator’s eye is captivated by the illusionistic images of an alpine landscape projected on the walls through small openings in paint cans. Ordinary magnifying glasses leaning against the outside of the partially crushed cans focus the images of the illuminated interior of the cans on the outside walls, creating a panoramic scene that uses commonplace but cleverly hand-crafted materials.
Common objects and mundane activities are the starting points for Shin-Il Kim’s Water and Joel Murphy’s Toasters. Water is a video inspired in part by Buddhist sensibilities; Toasters is an unconventional kinetic sculptural installation inspired in part by post-Dada ideas and cybernetics. Water began with film of water falling over hands. During production the artist projected individual video frames onto paper, creating hundreds of pressed line drawings. Before animating the drawings, Kim refilmed them, projecting light from a side angle in order to make the lines of the paper visible. The resulting abstract images of running water, with sound projected in the background, are metaphors for existence and nonexistence according to Eastern philosophies. Murphy’s Toasters are constructed from heating elements of toasters, plastic caps worn in beauty salons, and other handmade parts. When the heating elements are on, they glow red hot, and the switches spark with electricity. At that point, the caps, suspended above the heating elements, fill with hot air and rise, breaking the electrical switch. When the air cools, the caps fall over the heating elements, reconnecting the switches and beginning the two-minute process again—poetic gestures embodying dynamic equilibrium.
Marco Roso’s video One More Time (Ill. 7) features two images of a woman in altered states of consciousness: in one she is observed inducing self-hypnosis and in the other self-levitation. Using film techniques with cameras positioned around the subject, Roso created the illusion of movement keyed to an electronic beat that intensifies the hypnotic trances.
Low-tech handiwork characterizes much of the art in this exhibition, calling to mind Noah Loesberg’s corrugated cardboard Modular Brackets, Naz Shahrokh’s Column of folded newspapers, Miyoung Sohn’s Metal Sculptures made from everyday materials wrapped in aluminum foil, or Phoebe Washburn’s Greed, The Landscape Maker, made from thousands of small pieces of colored wood fitted into a citylike structure.
Much of the enjoyment in viewing AIM 24 is figuring out the labor-intensive working processes that draw on low-tech know-how. Bravo to the artists whose quantum leaps of imagination are matched by their handcrafting skills.
NOTES
1. The selection committee included Jackie Battenfield, facilitator of the AIM program, Lydia Yee, senior curator, Amy Rosenberg Martínez, assistant curator, Judi Werthein, artist, and Petra Riviere, education program associate. The exhibition ran from April 15 to June 20, 2004.
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