The Forest Island Project third session artists – Alice Könitz, Brian O'Connell and Nina Waisman – are showing work developed during their summer residency session in collaboration with UC Santa Barbara's Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory.
CLOSING PARTY - SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30 - 6-8:30 PM!
GALLERY HRS: 12 - 2 PM Sat & Sun. Or by appointment (801) 842-3734. Oct 26 - Nov 30
FI Studios @ Main Street Promenade
3343 Main Street, Mammoth Lakes, California 93546
Avalanche Dynamics Session Co-Curated by Brian O'Connell
ALICE KÖNITZ
Domestic Pavilion is an evolving modular sculptural work dedicated to the investigation of plant material and hand-made tools.
Playing with the forms and processes of DIY built-out/live-in vehicle culture and self-sufficient survivalist tropes, the Pavilion (part of an ongoing series of themed sculptural pavilions and display structures) is outfitted with a set of semi-translucent curtains, allowing space within the structure to be divided in multiple ways. Objects that are not used can be stored in a cache that‘s covered by a metal plate, which double functions as a cooking plate.
Objects gathered within the structure are either made from local plant material, or from the remnants and cast-offs of industrially made consumer goods, such as tin cans and cardboard. The first exhibition of Domestic Pavilion (at COLA in Los Angeles) included handmade objects inspired by classes Könitz had been taking with the Los Angeles based teacher of self-reliance and survival skills expert, Christopher Nyerges. For its second exhibition at FI, the Domestic Pavilion takes on a new layer of naturalist, skill-based information, incorporating objects made from pine resin found and developed during a residency in Mammoth Lakes.
BRIAN O’CONNELL
The process of data collection assumes that a critical mass of minute parts will accumulate into a whole producing a picture that has meaning.
Seen through the right instruments, snow, as Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory researcher Jeff Dozier describes it is “the most colorful substance on earth.” But a clear picture of data requires interpretation and interpolation. Brian O’Connell’s interest is in the inbetween parts of this process. Here, triple digital exposures of the same scene, each with a different filter (red, blue and green) are altered at the pixel level to recreate what a sensor sees. Layered back on top of each other and cropped down to a tiny fraction of the actual image, the fragments are then printed as elements of the total data set.
Zoomed in models of structures that, when combined, could create a version of the “gradient index lens” (invented in the 1940s by scientist Rudolf Luneburg at USC where O’Connell also teaches) manifest again as tiny parts of a larger structure, one that is actually used to see. Growing out of conversations with SNARL researchers and missions to various locations around Mammoth Lakes, a quixotic mission to produce a perfect ice lens, an experimental sound dish, and other technological experiments further explore the various processes of capturing and filtering information as playful examinations of our contemporary understanding of visual space, both as seen by the human eye and as augmented by technology.
NINA WAISMAN
During a period of time spent as artist-in-residence at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), Wasiman’s engagement with the very real and cutting-edge search for intelligent life in outer-space led to two fundamental questions – what exactly constitutes life and how exactly does one define intelligence? With the implications of these questions refocused back onto our own biosphere, Waisman has continued to consider the various activities of non-humans in our midst (bacteria, flies, microbes…) investigating not their primitive simplicity, but their radical non-human sophistication.
Shown here is documentation of two back-to-back performances (informed by biology consultant Dr. David Herbst) of Waisman’s original dance/vocal work “internatural 1” which took place during sunset hours at Mono Lake’s South Tufa in September. The performance’s premise…
A small group of aliens arrive at Mono Lake.
Where they come from, the way to learn about something is to synchronize with its rhythms and behaviors.
To let it tune them from the inside out.
What if we humans similarly learn from our planet's long-surviving elders?
That is - every other life form on Earth - before we extinguish most of them?
On this visit to Mono Lake, the aliens encounter water, tufa, cyanobacteria, alkali flies, gulls, humans, volcanos.
And digital logic.