Compelled by recent political tensions and the desire to illuminate them, Glen Fogel’s new video documents the Billy Graham Crusade that took place at Flushing Meadows in the Summer of 2005. Focusing on Graham’s warm up act, a Christian rock group, the video frames audience members in the foreground against enormous monitors broadcasting a live edit of the performances. This hallucinatory footage, a kind of “found spectacle,” resembles a construct of virtual, blue-screen reality, and is further abstracted by Fogel’s edits and effects. This work maintains the artist’s concern for transforming extreme states of being, but by focusing on a vast audience instead of on video portraiture (as in his previous work), Fogel extends his transformations in a manner that destabilizes the visual field to a point where a simple representation of the world can no longer support a constantly evolving reality.

Glen Fogel was born in 1977 in Denver, Colorado. He studied film/cultural studies at McGill University in Montreal before moving to New York in 1998. He recently had a solo show at Galeria Andre Viana in Portugal, and his work has been exhibited at Artists Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002 Biennial), The Toronto International Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Lincoln Center among others.

Yoko Inoue’s installation titled How American?Anonymous/Self/Portrait presents a unique approach to portraiture. Related to past performance work by Inoue, the artist herself becomes the subject matter while simultaneously relinquishing specific control of her project through the delegation of the work’s execution to others. A number of artists were asked by Inoue to make portraits of her wearing a wool cap with an embroidered American flag, concealing the artist’s identity and ethnicity. The artists asked to participate are Brandon Soloff, Melanie Baker, Darius Ziura, Alina Zakaite, and an “anonymous street painter.” The work investigates the complexities of ethnic assimilation through the masking of identity and an assumed patriotism driven by market forces.

The other component of this installation is a pile of 100 sweaters and 100 hats knitted with the American Flag on them. Commissioned by Inoue and produced in the Andean region of South America, these wool products are the prototype of a future performance entitled “Transmigration of the SOLD” which investigates the possibilities of redirecting the global market trend of cultural product assimilation in capitalism.

Originally from Osaka, Japan, Yoko Inoue graduated from Hunter College, NY with an MFA. She received the NYFA Fellowship in Sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2003. She has recently awarded a grant from the Franklin Furnace Archives, Inc, for the Fund for Performance Art Award, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters and Sculptors Grant Program and a Fellowship grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She will be participating in an artists’ in residence program at .EKWC/European Ceramic Work Center in Holland in 2007. Inoue’s work has been shown in New York at Greene Naftali Gallery, SculptureCenter, The Bronx Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Art in General, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among other venues. She has had solo exhibitions at Flipside Gallery and five myles in Brooklyn and Von Lintel Gallery in Manhattan. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Time Out and other publications.

Related blog post: James Wagner