KRISTINE MARX Serpentine ELIZABETH SIMONSON Fast Forward Exhibition Dates: October 13 - November 10, 2007 Opening Reception: Saturday, October 13 from 6 - 8 PM Serpentine is a projected video piece by KRISTINE MARXthat transforms the main space at Fringe into an enveloping installation. It is an environment in flux. Sinuous black and white lines curve and straighten as they slide along the 30-foot gallery wall and floor towards a shifting central axis. The projections seem to soften, bend and warp the gallery's architecture. The abstract imagery moves through a series of permutations. Lines overlap and separate. They are initially sparse, then build up to a dense, nearly illegible complexity. The pattern expands and contracts, travels upwards and then slides downwards. The reflective surface of an adjacent wall creates the illusion of a continuous field. The video's sculptural presence involves the viewer on a physical level, engaging the body as an instrument of perception. Its undulating linear imagery and relationship to the gallery's architecture destabilizes the viewer's expectations of interior space. The installation points to the instability of what is seen and what is actually there. The works on paper continue ideas explored in the installation. In the drawings, simple, repetitive, linear forms build up to create complex structures. Through overlapping and interlacing, the images play with perception and assumptions of visual order. The drawings flirt with the boundary between line/shape and abstraction/figuration. KRISTINE MARX lives and works in New York City. In her work, she investigates the ambiguities of perception through relationships between image, space and architecture. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA from Hunter College in New York. She has exhibited her work most recently at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburg, Plane Space, New York, Herrmann and Wagner, Berlin, and the Mudima Center, Milan. She has been awarded various grants including a NYSCA grant in 2007 and a residency grant from the Mattress Factory in 2006. Last year she lived in Finland for the summer as a resident artist at Kolin Ryynanen Centre for Arts and Culture. In New York, she teaches digital art at Parsons School of Design and Hunter College, CUNY. This project is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency, and with support from the Experimental Television Center. Fast Forward premieres two new pieces by ELIZABETH SIMONSON. Both works simultaneously explore two major themes in her work: static structures that serve as an index of repetitive and time-based activity. Whisper consists of thousands of thin wires stretched across the floor in spider-leg like fashion. As delicate as hair in their consistency, each hand-placed wire arches over the segmented floor panel as their ends puncture the surface at increasing distances apart. Consisting of over 4,000 wires, the structure is governed by one organizing principle: the system behind the work is what dictates the visual outcome. Just as nature grows through the evolution of previous generations, the structure of Whisper is dependent on sequential logic. Accompanying Whisper is Sweet, a video that animates each sequence of Whisper. Every still is generated from color-coded drawings done by Simonson that were essential in the organization of Whisper. The result is a hypnotic steady march toward a chaotic complex conclusion of color, line, and pattern. The enormous task of both building and sequencing aspect of her systems underscores the complex relationship between a rigid and fixed formula with the limitations of material and maker. Simonson has consistently been intrigued with the aspiration of doing something with machine-like perfection while knowing that the fallibility of the human condition will come into play, creating unpredictable and complex beauty. The structures she creates function like living organisms, with their own inherent logic and fragility. Smaller studies works on paper related to the work above complete the show. ELIZABETH SIMONSON is a visual artist based in New York City who has explored aspects of nature, algorithms, and imperfect systems throughout her career. A graduate of Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts program, Elizabeth originally moved to New York from her native Minneapolis to pursue a career as a professional ballet dancer with the Feld Ballet. Her familiarity with time-based, performative art forms has informed her exploration of sequentially based installations that at times take weeks to construct and are often very temporal in their existence. Her work has been shown in numerous public institutions that include the Kohler Art Center, Krannert Art Museum, Addison Art Gallery, Austin Museum of Fine Art in addition to galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Her work can be found in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Goldman Sachs Collection, Hunter College, as well as numerous private individuals across the country.