Northwood and Other Locations

Joachim Koester

Exhibition: Jun 8 – Jul 16, 2000


At Artpace, Joachim Koester presents a new suite of photographs, Northwood and Other Locations, shot in Texas, installed in an architecturally specific manner. The viewer enters a darkened gallery, facing an unfinished wall in front of a blue glow. Koester’s five photographs are displayed on shelves on the opposite side of the wall, facing a bank of windows that has been tinted with a blue-gray gel. Lit only by the filtered daylight, the windows create a false sense of night, which evokes cinematic conceits. The photographs are sequenced on the shelves implying a modular, temporary system. The subjects of the images imply a minimal narrative, maintaining a sense of ambiguity with regard to time and space.

This manipulation of the viewer’s experience in the space creates a platform for their participation in a construction of a theme. The installation suggests the ways narrative can be changed through environment. The new work expands Koester’s interest in transformation—specifically, the transition of sites and narratives.

Although keenly interested in the cinematic narrative, Koester’s Texas work does not emerge from the iconic Western genre of filmmaking. And while previous works have examined specific cultural and geographic events related to exploration and politics, here, Koester avoids a direct historical reference. Rather, Koester evokes the ghosted narrative of the West, where a spirit of expectation—the frontier—is constructed through shifting environments and emotional states.

Artist

Joachim Koester

New York, New York, USA

New York-based Joachim Koester was born in 1962 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He completed his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, in 1993.
Throughout the 1990s, Koester has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Arnolfini, Bristol (2000); P.S. 1, Long Island City (1999); AstrupFearnly Museet, Oslo (1999); Kunst-Werke, Berlin (1999); INOVA, Milwaukee (1998); Greene Naftali, New York (1997, 2000); and Gallerie Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen (1996, 2000). His work has been included in significant group exhibitions, including P.S. 1’s Greater New York (2000); Organizing Freedom at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000); Cinema Cinema at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (1999); Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki’s This Side of the Ocean (1998); Nuit Blanche at the Musee d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998); The Louisiana Exhibition, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (1997); and Disneyland After Dark at Kunstamt Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (1996) and Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (1995). He was included in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, Documenta X (1997) and the 1995 Kwangju Biennial.
Joachim Koester’s conceptually-based work examines the narrative conditions of culture, framing their overt as well as their unexplored aspects. Through photography and video, he skews seemingly mundane situations and landscapes with editing, repetition, and shifts in color. Beautiful images entice the viewer, but upon careful inspection, there is discomfort in the images Koester creates; a sense of darkness, of social disorder, permeates his work.

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Curators

Amada Cruz

Los Angeles, CA
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Kellie Jones

New York, NY
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Nancy Rubins

Topanga, California, USA

Born in 1952 in Naples, Texas, Californian Nancy Rubins received her MFA from the University of California, Davis. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Paul Kasmin Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Venice Biennale Aperto. Rubins’ work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992. Rubins teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Art Department. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Annette DiMeo Carlozzi

Austin, TX

Independent curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi has built an expansive practice across the US as a curator of modern and contemporary art, focusing on ideas and experiences, artists and audiences. Raised in Boston and trained at the Walker Art Center, she has served in a variety of foundational roles: as the first curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now The Contemporary Austin); executive director of the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Visual Arts Producer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta; and in multiple positions—ranging from founding modern and contemporary curator to Deputy Director for Art and Programs to Curator at Large—at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Committed to expanding the canon, she has created notable exhibitions (Luis Jiménez, Paul Chan, Michael Smith, Deborah Hay, Negotiating Small TruthsAmerica/AmericasDesire), produced important commissions (Nancy Holt, Siah Armajani, Betye Saar, Vito Acconci, Byron Kim, Teresita Fernández), and acquired major works by a wide range of international artists. Carlozzi has had a long relationship with Artpace, having served as an early advisor, artist interviewer, and program panelist, member of the 1998 artist selection panel and 2001–03 Board of Visitors. In 2015 she curated Immersed from Linda Pace’s art collection, now called Ruby City.

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Dan Cameron

Newport Beach, California

From 2012 to 2015 he was Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. In 2006, Dan Cameron founded the Biennial Prospect New Orleans, where he worked at until 2011. From 1995 to 2005 he was Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where he developed numerous group exhibitions, such as East Village USA and Living inside the Grid, and several individual shows dedicated to the artists Martin Wong, William Kentridge, Carolee Schneemann, Carroll Dunham, Doris Salcedo, José Antonio Hernández Diez, among others.
As independent curator he has organized many exhibitions that brought him international attention, such as El arte y su doble (Fundación Caixa, Madrid, 1987); El jardín salvaje (Fundación Caixa, Barcelona, 1991); Cocido y crudo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1995), among many others. In 2003, he was the Artistic Director of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006, Co-curator of the 5th Taipei Biennial.
He has published hundreds of texts in books, catalogues and magazines, and has given numerous talks and conferences at museums and universities around the world, also carrying out an important teaching activity in New York.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist

London, England

Hans Ulrich-Obrist is the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, positions created for Ulrich-Obrist in April 2006. As a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France since 2000, among many other exhibitions he organized solo shows with Jonas Mekas (2003), Anri Sala (2004), and Cerith Wyn Evans (2006). Before this position Ulrich-Obrist was an independent curator for a decade, organizing the group show Take Me I’m Yours at the Serpentine (1995) and Retrace Your Steps: Remember at the John Soane Museum (1999), also in London, England. Ulrich-Obrist was a panelist in 1998 for the 1999-2000 year of artists, and was invited to be a speaker at the 2003 symposium, but was unable to come due to illness.
Photo by Dominik Gigler

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