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Artists Simon Lee and Claire Lesteven
April 7 to May 13, 2001
Simon Lee
Simon Lee shows an animated first generation projection that uses
light and chance to create a story through the coincidental collision
of objects, dust and photographs. Made for Smack Mellon's cavernous
and unique space, ten overhead projectors beam images through
a 24' pool of water onto a screen in the center of the gallery.
Shadows, images and objects swim across the screen in patterns
that establish themselves then dissipate to chaos and then calm.
Shadows are first generation quality -- in photographic terms
they are the picture as it is being taken -- unrepeatable images
that because of their familiarity are sometimes ignored or not
really seen. When two moving shadows meet surprising things begin
to happen, unexpected images are evoked, and the nature of the
reality behind them begins to shift.
Claire Lesteven
As a part of her interest in drawing, drawing with light, drawing
with video etc.,
Claire Lesteven has developed a photographic practice using cylindrical
multi-aperture camera obscurae. The resulting images are constituted
of overlapping fragments of 360¼ cityscape views.
Art News critic, Jeffrey Swartz has written that "by making images
which are the circular wrapping of the very eye that has taken
them, Lesteven is able to absorb city space, not from the outside
looking in but from the inside out".
Most recently, this work has been carried out in the contrasting
qualities of light in New York and Marseille (in the Mediterranean
south of Lesteven's native France). Intensity of light is needed
to capture the architectural forms whose identity and presence
Lesteven seeks to reveal. A crossroads in D.U.M.B.O. becomes an
encounter between several buildings, leaning towards each other,
a French soccer stadium envelopes the viewer, and warehouses in
France or New York open out their insides to become environments.
A series of photographs will be shown at Smack Mellon, as well
as the first showing of two of Lesteven's new camera obscura video
works.
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