Opening Reception: Saturday March 25th, 7 to 9 pm.
Second Gallery is pleased to present two new installations: I Love You More Than Life (and That's Not Saying Much) by Goody-B. Wiseman and A Thousand and One Knights of the Round Table of Knottingham by Alexandre Singh. Second Gallery is thrilled to continue with our mission to bring daring contemporary installation, sculpture, video, and new media art to the city of Boston, while providing a venue for artists to realize their projects in full.
In her new installation I Love You More Than Life (and That's Not Saying Much), Goody-B. Wiseman continues a body of work exploring sculpture as narrative, drawing on infamous unresolved crimes, in this case Lizzie Borden's notorious Fall River Ax Murders. This installation takes the form of a drawing room of a great house, shrouded and abandoned. Decadence and glory are replaced by wraiths and ghosts, sublimely beautiful in their decay, unsettling in their elegant implication of transience and decrepitude.
A love letter to the ax murderess of Fall River, Lizzie Borden, in filmic form, plays in the space. In this video the artist addresses an imagined Lizzie, free from historical fact, an embodiment of all things abhorrent and luscious. As pure fan fiction navigating narratives of sexuality, violence, fame, obsession and the occult-- the rapturous video is as hilarious as it is dark and deeply disturbed, as contemporary as it is gothic.
Combining her interests in sculpture, narrative and gesture, Wiseman will create a scene of mysterious elegance, glorious decrepitude, and quiet, pulsating horror. Calling on the failures of the Victorian era to sustain its indulgences and its unremitting fascination with "the other" and the macabre, I Love You More Than Life (and That's Not Saying Much) is a brutal, sensuous and wryly humorous meditation on the latent violence in both contemporary and historical conditions.
Central to the work of Goody-B. Wiseman is the transformation of language into shared experience: mining and sharing the histories of the loser and the disappeared. To that end, Wiseman works in video, audio, sculpture, printed matter, installation, and drawing. She received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2000 and her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Wiseman has been the recipient of many grants, fellowships, and residencies, and her work has been exhibited in galleries and film festivals throughout Canada, Europe and the United States. Represented by Mandarin Gallery in Los Angeles, Wiseman will participate in the 2006 California Biennial this fall. This is her first show in Boston.
Alexandre Singh's installation, A Thousand and One Knights of the Round Table of Knottingham, consists of a 20 minute animated story that is played in a sculptural arrangement of consumer and building materials. The physical sculpture is comprised of materials mentioned in the story: plywood, sheetrock, carpet, nails, screws, Pepsi bottles etc. that are arranged in a formal structure. It is not clear, however, if the sculpture is an illustration of the story or if the story has been woven for the benefit of the materials, producing a cyclical relationship between the narrative and the sculptural object. The video component of this installation is made up of a pattern of syncopated colors, wherein every word in the story corresponds to one of thousands of colors, a single color to represent that word, 'forest' being deep green and 'panic' a neon pink and so on. The end result is a sequence of monochrome 'paintings' flashing in a hypnotic rhythm. The audio component of the installation consists of the story itself, which is a fantastical reworking of the mythologies of modernism and formalism, revolving around the exploits of Yves Klein (a shaman of the jungles of Papua New Guinea) and his attempts to secure the brain of Kurt Schwitters (a Daedalus-like inventor lost in a labyrinth of his own creation). The narrative melds together many disparate stories including The Canterbury Tales, Pinocchio, War of the Worlds, Robin Hood, and Serge Gainsbourg's Melodie Nelson. The characters do not inhabit a particular historical period but cohabit a combined past, future and present.
A Thousand and One Knights of the Round Table of Knottingham explores the conflict between narrative and form in art, expanding on the notion that even high Modernism, which would appear to be anti-narrative, is loaded with a myth of heroic artists waging war on the mundane to procure sublime experiences. Twentieth century Modernism and Abstraction are recurring themes in Singh's work, though his approach to them is both celebratory of their optimistic stance on the power of art to incite social change, and critically reflexive toward these movement's masculine narrative tropes.
Born in France, Alexandre Singh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has a MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and has exhibited and performed at White Columns, Printed Matter, Alona Kagan, White Box, as well as many other exhibition spaces in the US and abroad. This is his first show in Boston.
I Love You More Than Life (and That's Not Saying Much) by Goody-B. Wiseman and A Thousand and One Knights of the Round Table of Knottingham by Alexandre Singh will be on display from March 25th to April 22nd, 2006, with an opening reception on Saturday March 25th from 7 to 9 pm. Second Gallery, 516 East 2nd Street, South Boston, MA 02127. PH: 617 413 9395 E: secondgallery@gmail.com W: www.secondgallery.org