FAX
Second floor gallery
March 16 – May 23, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 20 1pm
FAX Exhibit Talk with exhibition curator, João Ribas
Saturday, May 8 3:30-5pm
FAX will invite a multi-generational group of artists, architects, designers, filmmakers, and thinkers to conceive of the fax machine as a drawing tool. Participants will transmit fax-based work via the museum’s working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition. The accumulation of information, errors of transmission, junk faxes, “fax lore,” as well as drawings and text – some seminal examples of early fax art – will create an exhibition concerned with reproduction, obsolescence, distribution and mediation. Curated by João Ribas. This exhibition is co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI.
Although the technology for transmitting printed images and texts over distance dates from the nineteenth century—a machine for the purpose was patented in 1843 by Scottish mechanic Alexander Bain— it was the introduction of the modern fax through commercially available machines in the 1970s that turned facsimiles into a ubiquitous communications medium for international business. Artists readily exploited its immediate, graphic, and interactive character, making it an important part of the history of telecommunications art, nestled between the legacy of mail art and the nascent practices of new media.
Faxes by close to 100 participants sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center will form the core of this generative and accumulative exhibition; and subsequent institutions will each invite up to twenty additional artists to submit works to be presented at successive venues as a touring exhibition in collaboration with iCI. Participating artists include: John Armleder, Tauba Auerbach, Pierre Bismuth, Barbara Bloom, Mel Bochner, Jan De Cock, Peter Coffin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Morgan Fisher, Aurélien Froment, Ryan Gander, Matt Sheridan Smith, Liam Gillick, Joseph Grigely, Wade Guyton, Charline von Heyl, Matthew Higgs, Germaine Kruip, Glenn Ligon, Dr. Ronald L. Mallett, Josephine Meckseper, Olivier Mosset, Steven Pinker, William Pope.L, Seth Price, Pamela Rosenkranz, Dexter Sinister, Wolfgang Tillmans, Edward Tufte, and Christopher Williams, among others.
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Laurence Hyde: The Southern Cross
Main floor gallery
March 16 – April 18, 2010
In 1948, artist Laurence Hyde began working on The Southern Cross, a wood-engraving project that took him almost four years to complete. The Southern Cross is a “book without words” composed of 118 blocks that tells the story of a fictional Micronesian family that victim to the American military, a story based on actual events that took place on the Bikini Islands. In the 1946, the American government displaced a community of close to 200 people in order to use the area as a hydrogen bomb test site. The Castle Bravo detonation of 1954 and other tests have ensured that the area remains uninhabitable to this day. This series of prints reveals Hyde’s deep feelings of distress and the sense of concern and anger that he felt when hearing of these events. The Southern Cross series reveals the artist’s ability to use line and form to create an expressive and important body of work. The full set of proof prints can only be found in two galleries, the National Gallery of Canada and the Burnaby Art Gallery. The current political and social atmosphere will allow for renewed consideration as to the significance of this wood engraving series.
Laurence Hyde was born in England in 1914 and emigrated to Canada in 1926. While taking art classes at the well-recognized Central Technical School in Toronto, he became interested in printmaking, specifically wood engravings because of the possibility for fine detail and dramatic composition available in this medium. His style is known for its precision, power and elegance. Hyde died in Ottawa in 1987.