UMM’s fifth iteration took place on December 13th, 2016, and presented work by Lillian Schwartz, Anke Becker and Daniella Dooling. During the opening reception, at 7pm under the full moon, UMM also inaugurated a new series, Untested Address, with work presented by Nancy Popp, Robby Herbst, Stephen van Dyck and post-election poems curated by Janice Lee, Executive Director of Entropy magazine.
AM Gallery
Lillian Schwartz
“Mathoms” [1972], music by F. Richard Moore; “Enigma” [1972], music uncredited; “Mutations” [1972], music by Jean-Claude Risset; “UFOs” [1971], music by Emmanuel Ghent; “Papillons” [1973], music by Max Matthews; “Mirage” [1974], music by Max Matthews; “Metathesis [1974], music uncredited; “Collage” [1975], music by Joe Olive
Computer-mediated films and animations [ 32 minute loop ]
These films represent a sample of Schwartz’s influential early work with computer-mediated film and animation. Drawing on training in coding and mathematics and working with fellow researchers at Bell Labs, Schwartz blended artistic and scientific experimentation in a unique approach that “was fed by a keen capacity to twist new technologies against the grain of intended use and a multilingual mind at ease shuttling between scientific precision, abstract thought, and visionary foresight” (Artforum, 10/2016). The films feature soundtracks by prominent composers of early electronic and computer-generated music, and were created with a variety of methods including animating mathematical equations, controlling color TVs with computer programs, diffracting laser beams through plastic, and altering images left over from scientific experiments.
Lillian Schwartz is a pioneer of computer-mediated art. Born in 1927 in Cincinnati, the twelfth of thirteen children, Schwartz overcame both poverty and sexism to establish herself as an artist-researcher and by the late 1960s had begun to create a body of work – often in collaboration with engineers, physicists, psychologists and electronic music composers – that profoundly impacted fields of computer-generated film, video, animation, multimedia and virtual reality. Her work has received numerous awards including an ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art, and is housed in major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and numerous others.
F Gallery
Anke Becker
Utopie [2015]
Custom stamp on paper
Anke Becker’s drawings are made with a custom stamp of the word UTOPIE. The repetitive and cumulative act of stamping as mark-making from light to dark creates an “action” ink drawing that elegantly explores the nuance of grayscale. With a poetic touch, the sheer repetition of the word allows for opening rather than foreclosing of meanings, while the stamping process also gives the drawings a sense of the bureaucratic tedium inherent in enacting any vision of progress. Becker’s work evokes Oscar Wilde’s observation that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”
Anke Becker is an artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her art practice explores the relationship between money and labor and between drawing and text, revealing pattern deviations through the rhythm of obsessive repetition. Her work moves between conceptual drawing, visual poetry, collaborative installations and crowd-based art projects. She runs the Blog economicwords where she publishes her visual poetry, and she is the founder of the ongoing international exhibition project Anonymous Drawings. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been featured in various publications. Anke has been awarded fellowships from the Vermont Center 2011 and 2016, the Millay Colony for the Arts 2014 and the KHN Center for the Arts in 2015.
PR Gallery
Daniella Dooling
Stargazer [2013]
False eyelashes made from human hair, Maybelline mascara, and acrylic gel medium on paper
Dooling describes her “Stargazer” series of drawings as “an imagining of stars, constellations and asterisms,” thinking of her artistic process as a way to resonate with the “gaze of the astronomer or astrologer, the daydreamer, the impractical idealist.” Using gel medium to fix false eyelashes made from human hair on paper, and then applying mascara to reference various states of smearing – “when one cries or rubs one’s eyes in weariness and frustration” – Dooling creates evocative connections between appearance, emotion, the promise and limits of ocular pleasure, and the cosmic gaze. In “Stargazer,” a strange kind of beauty and the sublime collide, creating a magnificent spark that might linger much longer than expected.
Daniella Dooling received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art. She has presented solo exhibitions at Esther Massry Gallery (Albany, NY), Incident Report (Hudson, NY), Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, Anna Kustera Gallery (New York, NY), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), and she has performed “Room 10 Rants” (with Les LeVeque) in various venues. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, and has been written about in Art in America, Review, PAJ, Art Issues, The Village Voice, ArtUS and in Johanna Drucker’s book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity. Dooling has taught at Bard College since 2003 and currently lives and works in Tivoli, New York.
Opening Reception and Untested Address
Closing Reception and Untested Address
