Light Work and Urban Video Project (UVP) announce programming for April–June

The Connective Corridor, in collaboration with Light Work, is pleased to announce the next round of installations for the Urban Video Project, which will be on view at all three sites from April through June. The curators for this selection of work are Blake Carrington, Christopher Gianunzio, and Colin Todd, collectively known as Avalanche Collective.

About the Curators:

Blake Carrington, Christopher Gianunzio, and Colin Todd are the co-founders of the Urban Video Project and also work under the moniker Avalanche Collective. Avalanche Collective navigates contemporary urban space and systems through the historical lens of a polar expedition. Using performance and sculpture, the group creates scenarios where anachronistic and modern forms of spatial exploration collide. Everyday spaces become theatres for the romantic and obsolete.

Their selections for UVP include:

MONROE SITE (April 1–June 30, 2010)
333 E. Onondaga St.
Trevor Paglen, Code Names. Video projection.

"Code Names" by Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen’s Code Names exists as a list of words, phrases, and terms that designate classified military programs. These include classified exercises and units, intelligence programs, information compartments, and Pentagon “Special Access Programs.” Installed in downtown Syracuse, Code Names functions as a meditation on language and advertising whose product is foreign to the general population. The contents of the piece become metaphors for the unknown and ask the audience to ponder what exactly they mean.

Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer whose work deliberately blurs lines between social science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. His visual work has been exhibited at Transmediale Festival, Berlin; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, pA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the Istanbul Biennial 2009, and has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, Modern Painters, Aperture, and Art Forum. Paglen has received grants and commissions from Rhizome.org, Art Matters, Artadia, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. He is the author of three books, and holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley. Paglen lives and works in Oakland, CA and New York City.

ONONDAGA HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION SITE (April 1–30, 2010)
321 Montgomery St.
Jill Magid, Trust (17 min 44 sec) and Final Tour (3min). Video projection with sound.

"Final Tour" by Jill Magid

For the Evidence Locker series Jill Magid utilizes the complex surveillance systems in Liverpool, UK, to speak about the limits of communication and control. Final Tour finds the audience following Magid and a friend through the city of Liverpool as seen through surveillance cameras. In Trust Magid relies on communication with the police officers operating surveillance cameras to literally guide her through the city as she walks the streets with her eyes blindfolded. Trust and Final Tour are manifestations of a collaboration with the Liverpool police department. When projected in downtown Syracuse, the context and meaning of the work shifts from private to public commenting on our inability to be truly alone.

Magid's work transgresses our notions art's boundaries. She experiments with all media, literature, and experience to communicate her questioning of the world around us. She received her BFA from Cornell University and her MS in Visual Studies at MIT. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Modern in London, Gagosian Gallery in New York, Centre D'arte Santa Monica in Barcelona, Sparwasser in Berlin, and Stroom and the AVID (The Secret Service of the Netherlands) among others. She now lives and works in New York and Amsterdam.

ONONDAGA HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION SITE (May 1–30, 2010)
321 Montgomery St.
Miranda Lichtenstein, Trance Dance (5 min 34 sec) and Everything Begins and Ends in Exactly the Right Time and Place (9min 05 sec). Video projection with sound.

"Trance Dance" by Miranda Lichtenstein

Searching, misrepresentation, failure, and our troubled relationship to the natural world are components of Miranda Lichtenstein’s work. Trance Dance is a series of videos authored during various public events, yet it is not completely clear whether or not the events are engineered by the artist. What is clear is the strange environment that is revealed—a kind of cultish event with a very otherworldly soundtrack. When Trance Dance is viewed in public, its meaning shifts from one of an intense, almost spiritual experience to one of voyeurism.

"Everything Begins and Ends in Exactly the
Right Time and Place" by Miranda Lichtenstein

Everything Begins and Ends at Exactly The Right Time and Place comes from a similar place of spirituality. The video finds its protagonist wandering through a forest that seems to be unending. The juxtaposition of the urban setting of the projection with the lush forest in the video creates a new context to experience Miranda’s videos.

Miranda Lichtenstein received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Stadthaus Ulm, Germany; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Gallery Min Min, Tokyo; and Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. She was a recipient of The Giverny Residency Program and Fellowship, Claude Monet Foundation, Giverny, France. Lichtenstein lives and works in New York.

ONONDAGA HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION SITE (June 1–30, 2010)
321 Montgomery St.
Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, Several Interruptions, 3 min 44 sec. Video projection with sound.

"Several Interruptions"
by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead

Several Interruptions, which collages together many online videos in which people are seen holding their breath underwater, is both interruption (as its name suggests) as well as documentary, in which the seemingly mundane and numerous has been made back into something unique and original.

Thomson and Craighead have personally chosen, from some 61,000 possible files on YouTube, videos that they have edited together into brief vignettes, which interrupt each other sequentially and laterally. When projected outside, the contents of Several Interruptions ask the audience to skirt the line between public and private space. The installation functions as a cross-section of our contemporary existence pulled from the privacy of laptops and reinterpreted in the public setting.

Jon Thomson (b. 1969) and Alison Craighead (b. 1971) are artists living and working in London. They make artworks and installations for galleries, online, and sometimes outdoors. Much of their recent work looks at live networks like the web and how they are changing the way we all understand the world around us. Having both studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Jon now lectures part time at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison is a senior researcher at University of Westminster and lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University. They have exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, V2 Rotterdam, Neuberger Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bitforms in New York, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, and the New Museum in New York among others.

GENERAL INFORMATION

UVP is an important international venue for the public presentation of video and electronic arts.
It is one of the few projects in the United States dedicated to continuous and ongoing video art projections—while some other venues project work sporadically, all three UVP sites run, commercial free, from dusk to 11p.m., Thursday–Sunday, year-round. UVP is part of the Connective Corridor, which is emerging as a significant strip of cutting-edge cultural development connecting Syracuse University with downtown Syracuse. It is home to three major universities and more than 25 arts and cultural venues. In the coming months and years these venues will be stitched together and showcased with new urban landscapes, bike paths, imaginative lighting, public and interactive art, signage and way-finding systems. 

UVP uses the latest in digital projection technology to project high-definition video or digital images on the side of two buildings in downtown Syracuse. One projector is located atop a building and projects onto the side of the Onondaga Historical Association building at 321 Montgomery St. This site can project images up to 576 square feet and also features a unique directional sound system that can project sound to passersby on the sidewalk below without disturbing the occupants of adjacent buildings. The second high-definition projection site is located around the corner on the side of the Monroe Building at 333 East Onondaga St. This is the largest UVP site and can project an image as large as 80 x 45 feet, just shy of the size of an average IMAX screen. The third UVP site, located at Syracuse Stage, is a 300-square-foot LED curtain that uses 16,000 individual bulbs for more graphically oriented presentations.

UVP is a public art initiative of Syracuse with technology provided by Time Warner. It is one of the first permanent public video art exhibition venues in the country. Light Work is a nonprofit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

**Digital press images and image information for all videos are available upon request.