Like Oxygen
Bad at Sports - The Conversation - Like Riding a Bicycle - Sound & Vision - George Terry - Allison Wade
On View: April 29th - May 27th, 2017
Opening Reception: April 29th, 2017 | 7-10 PM
MOUNTAIN is pleased to present Like Oxygen, a group exhibition exploring the creative and cultural sustenance provided by artist conversations and interviews. For many, hearing the stories and experiences of artists can be informative, inspiring, voyeuristic, and regenerating. After reading two separate conversations with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon, the mercurial curator/critic/art historian, Hans Ulrich Obrist once described his passion for artist interviews as being “like oxygen”. Obrist writes of this experience as a unique entry point into the hidden world of the artist. This exposure brought him to the revelation that the artist interview could be a medium in and of itself. In that spirit, this exhibition at MOUNTAIN brings together several artists, collectives, and projects all dealing with artist interviews as the medium.
George Terry presents a video project
interviewing artists in their homes. The drifting fog and Twin
Peaks-esque soundtrack create a unique ambiance for the viewer. A series
of otherwise conventional conversations become a dream-like montage of
shared experiences of what it’s like to be an artist. Like Riding a
Bicycle (Katie Hargrave and Brett Hunter) present a published interview
series titled “How Not What”. These volumes focus on the process of
making in art (the how) over the end result (the what). Allison Wade
presents a project about communing with the dead. After discovering that
her Upper West Side apartment was once the former home and salon of
painter/poet Florine Stettheimer, Wade has hired a shaman to
communicate with potential spirits in the space (which, based on the
salon’s guest list could be anyone from Duchamp to O’Keefe to Stein).
The audio recording of this shaman’s seance (normally broadcast from the
artist’s apartment) will temporarily be broadcast via pirate radio from
the gallery on select days during the run of the exhibition.