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WEEK
THREE: JULIA SCHER
(VIDEOBOX) Julia Scher
JULY 20th - JULY 24th
Opening reception: Wednesday, July 21st 6-8 pm
Curated by Michael Rush, Curator/Critic
Julia Scher has made an art of surveillance since the late
1980's. Many video artists early on turned themselves and others into
objects for the camera's relentless gaze (Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Frank
Gillette, Dieter Froese), but none has become so immersed in the culture
of power games and legitimized spying than Julia Scher. Her techno-surveillance
performance/installations have been seen throughout the US and Europe.
"The monitors of surveillance are the eyes of a social body gone berserk,"
she wrote in 1991. "They signify a marked space. The screens of its network
police and patrol space. The surveillance image is the reconstruction
of a target." Obviously, since 9/11 her work has taken on a new intensity
and her early work has assumed an eerie prescience. In a signature Scher
installation, visitors can have a psycho-narcissistic-futuristic field
day: looking at themselves and spying on others on multiple monitors,
while at the same time becoming totally paranoid about who else might
be watching them on unseen screens anywhere in the world via live-feed
global surveillance!
-Michael Rush
Julia Scher was born in 1954 in Hollywood, California. She lives and works in Boston. Julia Scher is represented by the Andrea Rosen Gallery, NYC. Her work, which focuses on surveillance and the cyber-sphere, has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe. Scher reminds us of the fact that we are often unaware of the dangers constituted by the increasingly omnipresent surveillance systems, constantly monitoring us in the public space and - since short also - in our private rooms. "Scher is one of a number of emerging artists who deliberately misuse technology to expose its hidden ideological mechanisms. Demonstrating our complicity in the proliferating technologies used to surveil both our physical and virtual identities, she toys with the notion of scopophilia, the cheap, reflexive thrill of looking. (...) With its infinite links to packets of (potentially "dirty") data and its decentralized, labyrinthine design, the World Wide Web is an ideal medium for Scher. Indeed it might almost have been created by Scher herself, in her ongoing search for increasingly use-friendly surveillance systems that attract as they track." (Andrew Hultkrans)
Michael Rush
is a museum director, curator, and author/critic. He was Director and
Chief Curator of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art from 2000-2004.
For PBICA Rush curated MARJETICA POTRC: URGENT ARCHITECTURE (2003-4);
JAPAN:RISING, a survey of contemporary Japanese art (co-curated by Dominique
Nahas, 2003); VIDEO JAM, with co-curator Galen Joseph-Hunter, a forty-five
artist exhibition of new video art and installation; BROOKLYN!, co-curated
with Dominique Nahas; SCULPTURE NOW, a survey of international contemporary
sculpture; and the first solo exhibitions in the US of Sue Williams and
Viennese Actionist Gunter Brus. In the New Media Lounge he presented a
wide range of artists, including Marina Abramovic, Michal Rovner, Leo
Villareal, Oliver Herring and several web-art collectives.
A widely recognized writer and critic, he is the author of the books NEW
MEDIA IN LATE 20TH CENTURY ART and VIDEO ART, both commissioned by Thames
and Hudson publishers, London. VIDEO ART, published in December, 2003,
is the first comprehensive survey of the field since the mid-1980ês. He
is a regular contributor to THE NEW YORK TIMES and has written extensively
for Art in America, Newsweek.com, artext, Review, Bookforum, PAJ, Art
New England and several other publications. He has published more than
300 articles and reviews on contemporary artists, especially those working
in video, film, digital art and performance. He has also written catalogue
essays for exhibitions in several museums including The Whitney Museum.
He studied at the Jesuit College of Arts and Letters at St. Louis University
and holds a doctorate from Harvard University.