The AC Presents 3 New Exhibitions: Jonathon Keats: Strange Skies Ardan Özmenolu: 1Bird2Birds3Birds Elise Rasmussen: Salzburg Bough

About Strange Skies: Directed and Produced by Jonathon Keats Plants have roots. As a consequence of this simple fact, they do not travel naturally, lacking the chance to experience the world’s vast diversity, and even missing out on the many subcultures and microclimates of New York City. In order to let flora encounter distant realms vicariously, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats presents a series of travel documentaries specifically targeted to the plant kingdom.

Given their ability to perform photosynthesis, plants are a fit audience for cinema. These travel documentaries exploit that affinity, screening onto plants’ leaves a selection of skies – the ultimate botanical tourist attraction – filmed in the United States and Europe. Since plants do not have human eyesight, and perceive light only in aggregate, footage is projected onto a scrim which diffuses the picture, streaming subtly changing tints of blue onto the foliage below. Strange Skies will be screened for a select botanical audience at the AC Institute from February 4th through March 13th, 2010. People are also invited to visit. But of course, human experience will be second-hand: Strange Skies is presented for the entertainment of plants.

About Jonathon Keats: Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, fabulist and critic residing in San Francisco and Northern Italy. Recently, he choreographed the first ballet for honeybees at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has also exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, unveiled a prototype Ouija voting booth for the 2008 election at the Berkeley Art Museum, and attempted to genetically engineer God in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Exhibited internationally, his projects have been documented by PBS, NPR, and the BBC World Service, garnering favorable attention in periodicals ranging from The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, to Nature and New Scientist, to Flash Art and ArtUS. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and is represented by Modernism Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

About 1Bird2Birds3Birds: The foundation of my art springs forth from the idea of repetition as it investigates the process of image consumption, history and permanence in relation to mass production, ritual and accompanying psychological states. My investigation into our consumption of images splits off into two independent yet complimentary impulses. In some of my pieces, repetition provides social commentary; in others, it conjures a feeling of ritual and a more personal space for a contemplative mood.

I subject images to reproduction on that most ubiquitous yet disposable of modern conveniences, the Post-it note. Social commentary enters into the experience as the images eventually curl and fall away.

My approach to my art and its sources has been and will always be contemporary in the extreme: my investigation into image coexists with aesthetic gestures that challenge, provoke and invite.

About Ardan Özmenolu: Ardan Özmenolu, born in Turkey,in 1979, lives and works in Istanbul and New York. She obtained her BFA in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design as well as her MFA in Graphic Design from Bilkent University, Turkey. She was an Artist in Residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, Ateliergemeinschaft Milchhof e.V. Berlin and Frans Maserell Centrum in Belgium. She contributed to several exhibitions since 2002.

Her recent projects are site-specific screen print installations, which incorporate architecture and sculpture, using materials such as glass and post-it notes. The transparent sculptures by Özmenolu show an extraordinary glimpse inside the body. At the interface between printmaking and sculpture, three-dimensional, portraits come into being.

Since her first solo exhibition in Istanbul and the second in Berlin in 2008, Ardan Özmenolu tirelessly continues to carve a unique place for herself in the art world, somewhere in between the disciplines of sculpture and printmaking.

About Salzburg Bough: “At the salt mines of Hallein near Salzburg the miners throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later, through the effect of waters saturated with salt which soak the bough and then let it dry as they recede, the miners find it covered with a shiny deposit of crystals.” —Stendhal, On Love, 1822

The Salzburg Bough takes its inspiration from the chapter in Stendhal’s book describing “crystallization,” the most important stage in the act of falling in love. This metaphorical term describes attraction as being the shimmering crystals encrusted on an otherwise ordinary leafless bough. The piece was originally installed in the former salt factory in Hallein that inspired Stendhal’s writing and is re-created for this exhibition.

About Elise Rasmussen: Elise Rasmussen (b. 1977, Edmonton, Canada) first honored her franco-philia at the age of ten by proclaiming she would go by her middle name Elise. She continues to indulge her penchant for French culture by spending time in cafes, using Garamond typeface whenever possible, and creating projects inspired by New Wave cinema and the French Revolution. In addition to these pursuits, her works explore many themes including the relationship between salt and love, and how art makes people sick.

Elise received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. She has exhibited in the United States, Canada, Austria and Germany. Elise lives in Brooklyn, NY and is currently working on a project that investigates reasons why the Atlantic Ocean is ruining her love life, and the legacy of the Cod Fishery and Beothuk cultures on contemporary identity in Newfoundland.

About AC Institute [Direct Chapel]: AC’s mission is to advance the understanding of art through investigation, research and education. It is a lab and forum for experimentation and critical discussion. We support and develop projects that explore a performative exchange across visual, verbal and experiential disciplines. We encourage critical writing that challenges conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity as well as the boundaries between the rational and subjective.