Hudson (Show)Room Exhibition: Nina Katchadourian
Nina Katchadourian
01.22.02
About the Artist
Born in 1968 in Stanford, CA, Nina Katchadourian earned a B.A. in Visual Arts
and Literature and Society from Brown University, Providence, RI, in 1989. She
earned her M.A. in Fine Arts in 1993 from the University of California, San Diego,
CA. Katchadourian has been awarded numerous grants including the Art
Matters Grant (1994) and Konstsamfundet Artists Grant, Helsinki, Finland
(1998).
Katchadourian has shown throughout the United States and internationally,
including exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of
Natural History, and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; Akron Museum
of Art, OH; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Islip Art Museum, NY;
Fabric Workshop and Museum and the University of the Arts Museum,
Philadelphia, PA; The Museum of Textiles, Toronto, Canada; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; Serpentine Gallery, London, England;
Lnnstrm Art Museum, Rauma, and the Lahden Biennale, Lahit, Finland; Bors
Konstmuseum and Norrtlje Konsthall, Sweden.
The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
About the Exhibition
Nina Katchadourian's art is subtle and obsessive, whimsical and intelligent.
Through her varied practice of photography, sculpture, video and sound works,
she gathers, categorizes, and analyzes information, imposing order on inherently
illogical ventures and communicating meaning from the virtually meaningless.
Her study of language and its absence, as well as intrinsic order and applied
patterns, calls to question our very understanding of communication and
intention. This Hudson (Show)Room exhibition joins works from three related
series in the artist's oeuvre.
In Mended Spiderwebs and Other Natural Misunderstandings,
Katchadourian inscribes her own eccentric and persistent vision of organization
and communication. Using tweezers and red sewing thread, she patched holes
in broken spiderwebs that she encountered on the island of Prt in the Finnish
archipelago, resulting in floating red patterns among the delicate silvery nets.
Katchadourian inserted each thread segment individually into the webs: short
segments were anchored by the natural stickiness of the webs and long
segments were attached by dipping the ends in white glue. The artist starched
thread occasionally to make it stiffer and easier to use. She patched each hole
until it was completely repaired or the webs could no longer bear the weight of
the thread.
Her hands, of course, often caused further damage to the webs. To the
artist's surprise, spiders consistently rejected each patch job by discarding the
thread from their webs during the night and repairing the holes using their own
method. Some of the larger patches containing glue retained their form after
being ejected from the webs. In Mended Spiderweb #8 (Fish-Shaped
Patch) and Mended Spiderweb #14 (Spoon Patch), Katchadourian
presents the rejected patches alongside her photographs of the patched webs
in situ. Do-It-Yourself Spiderweb Repair Kit, a plastic box with
scissors, tweezers, adhesive, and red thread, demystifies the artist's process and
seems to offer a retail-ready encounter with nature.
The video GIFT/GIFT, 1998, playfully references arachnid behavior of
wrapping prey in silk and presenting it to another spider. In the video, an angry
spider battles the artist's tweezers as she inserts letters spelling the word "gift."
Ironically, when pronounced in Swedish, gift means "poison." Finally, the artist
inserts each letter into the web, albeit damaging the web in the process. The
spider returns, extracts the letters in the order they were applied, and repairs the
web itself.
In Indecision on The Moon, 2001, the audience enters an entirely
darkened room suggestive of the vastness of deep space. Inside, the listener
hears an audio recording of Neil Armstrong's historic 1969 lunar landing. The
artist, however, has altered the disk to play only the recorded static and
interjectory pauses spoken by the astronaut, reducing the event to a pattern of
static and stutters. Nonetheless, the recording is immediately recognizable.
Intrigued by the perplexities of translation, encryption, and comprehension,
Katchadourian considers the empty spaces to be as telling and encoded as the
event itself. The static void is unmistakably familiar, and the beeps, bursts, and
tunneling background noise are the sounds of time and distance. In a thoughtful
balancing act between human and mechanical elements, Katchadourian
highlights the event's era and remoteness by decontextualizing it and putting it in
an abstract form.
In Eight Years of Sorting Books Katchadourian, again, isolates a
pattern within a system, in this case, library books. Working with specific
libraries˛from museums, offices, galleries, and private homes˛she singles out
particular titles and arranges them in poetic stacks. The titles, when read in
Katchadourian's sequence, form short stories, aphorisms, or poetry alluding to
the contents of the collection from which they were derived. Included in this
exhibition are seven prints of book clusters and an on-going slide show
documenting approximately 40 images since the project's inception.
Exhibition Dates
January 22 pril 7, 2002
Opening Reception
Tuesday, January 22, 6:30-8:00 PM
Gallery Walk-Thru with the Artist
Tuesday, January 22, 2002, 7:00 PM
Brown Bag Lunch
Wednesday, February 27, 12:00-1:00 PM
Join us for a tour of Nina Katchadourian and a brown bag lunch provided
by Pecan Street Deli. Please call ArtPace to make reservations.
Event Location
All events held at ArtPace, 445 N. Main Avenue. Free parking at N. Flores and
Savings Streets. ArtPace is open to the public Wednesday thru Sunday, 12-5
PM, Thursday 12-8 PM, and by appointment. There is no charge for
admission.
About ArtPace
ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio serves as an
advocate for contemporary art and as a catalyst for the creation of significant art
projects. We seek to nurture emerging and established artists and to provide
opportunities for inspiration, experimentation and education. Through our
International Artist-in-Residence Program, we invite nine artists annually to
participate in a two-month residency which supports the evolution of new ideas in
art. Our broad range of panels, lectures, artist talks, and studio visits cultivates
diverse audiences for contemporary art and provides a forum for ongoing
dialogue.
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