Alexander Gray Associates is pleased to present Meadowlark (2008), a six-channel video installation by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, with Bently Spang.

Meadowlark is a meditation on the American landscape as an ecological, political, and visual entity. The video installation reinterprets Frederic Remington’s seminal Western painting, Indian Simulating Buffalo (1908). In Meadowlark, this painting is re-staged as a video on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, to spotlight the rapidly changing landscape of the American West. In this way, Meadowlark presents a critical view of Remington’s pictorial narrative, and questions art’s impact on the historic record and the future. Meadowlark’s conceptual impact is heightened through its visual presentation, with six monitors installed in a circular format, referencing Nineteenth-century cycloramas—immersive, room-sized paintings in the round that typically depicted foreign wonders, historical events, or war.

Meadowlark was commissioned by the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA.

Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom’s collaborative work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, MA; their work is included in the exhibition Dance With Camera, organized by the ICA Philadelphia. Ann Carlson is a choreographer, performer and conceptual artist whose award-winning works have delved into the nature of vernacular cultures by adapting and choreographing everyday gestures into dance for a broad range of individuals. Lawyers, day laborers, doctors, basketball players, fly-fishermen, and the custodial staff at an Ivy league college have all found themselves in collaboration with Carlson. Carlson received a 2009 USA Artist Fellowship, a 2008 American Masterpiece Award, a 2005/2006 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, Harvard University and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography, in addition to a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Performance.

Mary Ellen Strom is a video artist who utilizes media technologies in service of social critique. Her installations and site-specific projects unearth submerged narratives within art, history and cultural discourse. Her work has been exhibited in a wide range of contexts including museums, galleries, passenger trains, large-scale video projections onto industrial sites and mountain rock faces, in empty retail stores, and horse arenas. She has received recent awards including the Artadia Award, Fund for Art and Dialogue, 2007 and the Augustus Saint-Gaudens memorial Fellowship Prize 2006. Recent project grants include LEF Foundation, Art Matters, Arts Partners, Rockefeller MAP and Creative Capital among others.

Bently Spang is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Billings, Montana. His site-specific video installation, photography, live performance, and short films explores issues surrounding his Northern Cheyenne identity.