Outpost Artists Resources is pleased to present Far From Now an exhibition of works by a group of artists who use video and digital media to explore a wide range of issues and ideas. The participating artists include Perry Bard, Janet Biggs, David Brody, Matt Freedman, Richard Haley, David Stone/Steven Kaltenbach, and Kristen Lucas. The diverse works presented by these artists range from single channel projections, to video mixed with performance and other media, to interactive installations.

The Outpost is located at 1665 Norman Street, Ridgewood, Queens 11385. The opening is Friday, May 31st, 7:00 – 10:00, coinciding with Buschwick Open Studios’ opening. Outpost is an anchor space for BOS and will be open for the entire weekend event. The exhibition runs from Friday, May 31, 2013 to Friday, June 28, 2013. Hours are 1:00 – 6:00 Fri, Sat, Sun. Contact: 718. 599.2385, http://www.outpostartistsresources.org/ Far From Now is curated by Caroline Cox.

There will be a night of video screening and performance on Friday June 21st. Video screenings will include: Perry Bard, Boomerang, Janet Biggs, Fade to White, David Brody/Doug Henderson, Disobey This Command, Richard Haley,  Attempt to Turn a Fly into Dust. Performances will include: Matt Freedman with Tim Spelios, Lightening Sketch Performance, Kristen Lucas, Durational Aesthetics.

Perry Bard’s piece, Sumatra, looks at the coffee industry from multiple perspectives while also acting as a replacement ritual to quell her caffeine consumption. This is acted out in Sumatra through a five channel video that intermixes footage she found on the internet of coffee production and of fetishized frappuccinos, with footage that she shot of the flame from her stove, cued-up in preparation for making her morning cup of fair trade, dark roast coffee. While trying to placate her addiction through filming the activity of making a cup, Bard is also ever conscious of the lack of fair trade options as the industry continues to explode.

Janet Bigg’s video, Duet, examines the connections and contradictions between the sport of NASCAR racing and the world of Opera in order to illuminate the structures and dynamics of power, heroism, and to reflect on commercialism. By juxtaposing sequences of a frenetic pit crew at work during a NASCAR race with the sublime performance of the Flower Duet from the opera Lakme, Biggs observes that within the construction of a hero, that subservient roles are needed to raise an individual to the position of hero. This is played out through the dynamics of NASCAR with the pit crew/driver relationships, and in the opera sequences with the diva/accompanist relationship, while looking at historical roles between races. Also in Duet, Biggs examines and draws parallels between the hyper commercialization in NASCAR’s corporate sponsorship and the Flower Duets over-used, over-popularized status.

David Brody’s work, Bloom, is a 1.5 minute loop which uses 3-D computer animation to propose a visual analogy for a doctored fragment of classical music. The music is taken from the first bars of the Kyrie from Mozart’s Mass in C Minor; after an instrumental introduction, a full chorus layers a series of consonant chords as if building the steps of a temple. In Bloom’s soundtrack these same choral “steps” are then played in reverse before looping back to the beginning. The imagery is derived from Brody’s isometric drawing practice, turned into virtual 3-D forms. All the animation in this piece is done by scaling up or down.

Matt Freedman exhibits the Golem of Ridgewood, that purports to be the remaining footage from a silent documentary filmed with an 8 mm camera in 1940 by a 13 year old boy, Elias Bergman. He surreptitiously followed the elders of his synagogue in Ridgewood, Queens as they built a suit of armor for a Golem that was worn around the neighborhood by a congregation member. Golems, being the mythical monster built by a great rabbi to protect his congregation from a pogrom, the apparent idea was to reassure members of the nearby Jewish population who felt threatened by local bigots as Ridgewood at the time was one of the principal sites of the pro nazi American Bund movement. Freedman also sculpts a cast of characters tied to his narrative through a strange pattern of parallels and coincidences.

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Richard Haley’s piece, Extending a Rain Puddle’s Reach By 16 Inches, includes a video exhibited along with graphite on paper, and rain puddle extending device. Haley’s video shows him alone in a field digging in the mud that surrounds a puddle and pushing the puddle extending device into the ground until the puddle flows into the basin, extending the length of the puddle. Haley observes, “At this junction of human governance and interaction with natural cycles the absurdity of my action is revealed. By replicating and intervening into natural systems; I impose a manmade logic onto resistant natural technologies. My own futile technologies intentionally call into question the whereabouts of agency within organic and inorganic forms.”

David Stone and Stephen Kaltenbach collaborate on the video How to make a Slant Step out of two clothes hangers, newspaper and glue. This video documents Stone and Kaltenbach’s humorous and funky demonstration of how to construct a Slant Step. Stone and Kaltenbach’s piece harkens back to the Slant Step project of the 1960s that was set in motion when William Wiley found the enigmatic Slant Step in a salvage store in San Francisco and later gave it to his then grad student Bruce Nauman; eventually versions of the Slant Step were made by many artists including William Wiley, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Robert Arneson, Stephen Kaltenbach among others. With Sole Ripper Kristin Lucas creates an interactive installation where the viewer using a mouse can scroll through and view the pages of her PDF format digital book on screen. The book contains a 1:132 scale architectural view of a fictional pedestrian roller coaster modeled for an empty lot in Manhattan discovered by Lucas on Google Maps.  The fragmented, out of order architectural plan is a visual corollary to the download process in which files are broken down into packets and transmitted over internet pathways from one computer to another, and reconfigured at their final destination. Only Lucas leaves the task of file reconfigurability open to the viewer, who can printout pages, assemble or reassemble them into a hybrid poster map. The work itself integrates digital, cinematic, sculptural, and architectural languages.