Michael Greathouse: “What Is It that Wakes the Sleeper?”

In AC [Direct] I, Michael Greathouse exhibits his most recent series of video shorts: Banquet, Valentine, Badlands, Windows, Everything Seems to Be OK…, In Dreams as well as the first showing of Incarnation. Inspired by the cinema genres of film noir and early Hollywood horror, each piece is a digital cinematic collage of composited, found images and sounds seamlessly integrated within a 3D computer animation process.

Within an infinite loop of isolated moments, Greathouse captures the surreal, oneiric storytelling reminiscent of black and white films of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Filled with ominous, asynchrono us sounds, he creates dark, unsettling hyper-real images saturated with visual metaphors and non-linear associations. His experimental and conceptual narratives leave questions unanswered and the storylines implied yet never defined.

Influenced by his background in sculpture, Greathouse’s videos have the profound awareness of space along with a poignant, dreamlike clarity and form. His enigmatic and sensuous monochrome palette captures impossible places suspended in time and reality.

Born in Kansas City, and presently living in New York, Greathouse has been exhibited in numerous film festivals including the Ace Film Festival, (New York); Cannes Film Festival; Kargart International Video Festival, (Istanbul); “Videologia,” (Volgograd) and the International Festival of Independent Cinematography, “KinoLev,” (Lviv) where he was awarded first place in animation. He has also exhibited in the “Louisiana Biennial ;” the Louisiana Contemporary Arts Center; the New Orleans first international biennial, “Prospect 1” as well as an upcoming exhibition in 2009 at “Die Begegnung mit der andren Art,” Museum of Contemporary Arts (Siegen).

Laura F. Gibellini: “341 West 24th Street, New York”

For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. ; Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space”

In her autobiographical, site-specific installation at AC [Direct] II, Spanish artist Laura F. Gibellini explores the relationships between public and private environments. Incorporating line drawings and photographic digital prints, Gibellini builds a spatial narrative directly into the gallery through a recreation of a part of her apartment in New York City.

Investigating the elasticity and transience of lived spaces, “341 West 24th Street, New York” translates a trompe l’oeil fragment of time and place during her temporary stay in Manhattan. Gibellini delves into places that mirror our memories and negotiate our past and future. Her work is a complex visual topoanaylsis—one that permeates the psychological and emotional boundaries of the interior and exterior worlds we construct around us.

Gibellini has studied Visual Arts in Madrid and Kassel and is presently p ursuing a Doctorate in Contemporary Art Theory from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, including a Research Fellowship from MoMA. She has exhibited in the US at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe and extensively throughout Mexico, Europe and Asia. She has participated in the “I Public Art Biennial,” (Navacerrada, Madrid); “Linguistic of the Image: Spanish Videoart,” Casa Asia (Beijing); “VIDET 08,” International Videoart Festival, (Barcelona); “Taking Action,” Courier International Video Organization (Istanbul); and “Rizoma,” Cultural Institute of Baja California, (Tijuana).

In 2008 she was commissioned by the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid for the online piece, “Disculpen las Molestias (Artista Trabajando) / Pardon the Mess (Artist at Work)” as well as presented with an award in recognition of her overall body of work by Madrid’s City Council. Her w ork is part of the Spanish and Iberoamerican Contemporary Art Collection, Nuestra Señora de Africa, Student’s Residence, (Madrid) and the Contemporary Art Collection, Navacerrada’s City Council (Madrid).

Richard Kostelanetz: “SCRAM/BLEDS”

AC [Chapel] presents “SCRAM/BLEDS,” a sequence of visual poems by Richard Kostelanetz, one of America’s foremost intellectuals and prolific avant-garde artists. Enlarged in scale from its original chapbook size and offering a rare opportunity to collectively interact with the piece in a public forum, “SCRAM/ BLEDS” is being exhibited as an installation for the first time since its publication (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2008).

There is no category,“ism” or area of creative expertise that is expansive or porous enough to contain to all of Kostelanetz’s work. His versatile mastery of both written and visual language through experimental, unconventional art forms is unparalleled. Through his poetic vision, the means through which we communicate experience and decipher language around us become palpable and inclusive encounters.

A versatile artist, critic, writer, editor, publisher, composer, filmmaker and holographer, Kostelanetz has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the following institutions: Fulbright, Guggenheim Foundation, the Pulitzer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Born and raised and New York, he has contributed poems, stories, articles, reviews and experimental prose to hun dreds of magazines both in the US and abroad. He has written more than fifty books of criticism, cultural history and creative work, in addition to editing over three dozen anthologies of art and exposition.

Among the recent books authored by him are SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artist’s Colony (Routledge), 3 Canadian Geniuses (Colombo), More Wordworks (Talisman), and second editions of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Schirmer/Routledge) and Conversing with Cage (Routledge).

New books edited by him include AnOther E. E. Cummings (Liveright), The Gertrude Stein Reader (Cooper Square) and Virgil Thomson: A Reader (Routledge). Long active in alternative literary publishing, he co-founded Assembling Press in 1970 and alone founded Future Press in 1977 and Archae Editions in 1978.

As a media artist Kostelanetz has created language-based audiotapes, videotapes, films and holograms that have been exhibited and broadcast around the world. Both Anthology Film Archives (New York) and Bumbershoot (Seattle) have presented retrospectives of his audiovideotapes. “Wordsand” was the title of a multimedia exhibition of art with words, numbers and lines that toured North American universities in 1978-81. International Artists Books (Paris) mounted a retrospective of his book art in 1996.

Individual entries on Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster’s Dictionary of American Authors, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, NNDB.com and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories.