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Cajole the Nice Nice by Anna Elise Johnson
November 29th, 2014 through January 31st, 2015
BIOSPHERE 2
The Galveston Artist Residency is excited to welcome Biosphere2, an exhibition of recent works by Eric Heist. This installation continues Heist's interest in the economic and psychological dynamics of communal idealism in the face of individual interests. As in previous exhibitions by the artist, an array of media are directed toward a thematically-organized, research-based approach to an historic event.
In the early nineties, a multi-million dollar facility was constructed in the desert outside of Tucson in Oracle, Arizona. A team of 8 scientists/creative individuals were assembled, half were male, half were female, to live together for a two-year period in a 3.5 acre "closed system" in which no materials were removed or added to the environment. Oxygen, food, and waste would all have to be cultivated or disposed of within the Biosphere. There were a number of "biomes" constructed -- Desert, Savannah, Ocean, Rain Forest, Agriculture -- that were to be maintained by the "Biospherans" and would, in turn, maintain the biosphere, providing water, food, oxygen, and efficient waste recycling.
Biosphere 2 was an Earth-based model for a Mars space station/colony. It was conceived by visionary/poet/actor John Allen and influenced by artists that included Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs and Buckminster Fuller.
The Biospherans were expected to sustain themselves by growing and raising their own food and to maintain complex life support systems within this giant geodesic terrarium. Within six months a variety of factors converged to undermine the utopic nature of the project: negative publicity, interior malfunctions, lack of food, lack of oxygen and a power struggle between the visionary of the project, John Allen, and the funder, Ed Bass. This power struggle outside of the dome affected the individuals within, creating a deep and personal division. Within six months the Biospherans had separated into two groups of 2 men and 2 women that refused to speak or eat together.
This exhibition stands as a microcosm of the inherent conflicts within a creatively-conceived collaborative effort.
Eric Heist is an artist who works in multiple media exploring the effects of power upon individuals and the contradictions that exist between group and individual interests. Past installations have addressed military, religious, corporate, and economic systems through video, sculptural objects, and works on paper. Installations are thematically organized and individual works represent different perspectives on a singular topic that acquire meaning through a cumulative effect. Recent exhibitions include Foundations, a solo exhibition at Schroeder Romero/Shredder, NY, UStrust, a solo exhibition at Schroeder Romero, Candy Factory, a collaborative project with Genesis P-Orridge, at Team gallery, New York and Centre of Attention, London. His work has been included in exhibitions at Participant, Inc., Max Protetch, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, White Columns, Roebling Hall, NY, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. He is a founder and current director of Momenta Art, a not for profit gallery in Brooklyn, NY. He has taught at New York University, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and The Cooper Union, New York. His work has been reviewed by Holland Cotter of the New York Times, William Powhida in The Brooklyn Rail, and Christian Viveros-Faun� in Art in America.
Anna Elise Johnson
CAJOLE THE NICE NICE
Opening in the GAR Project Space, we're excited to present Cajole The Nice Nice, a collection of new works by Anna Elise Johnson. The title for this exhibition comes from a line in the Dada Manifesto by Tristan Tzara that asks if art is only meant to "cajole the nice nice bourgeois." The exhibition includes a sculptural acrylic collage and a series of two-dimensional collages on hardboard. All manipulate a historical photograph that presents an archetypal scene of political negotiation. In the photo, two suited leaders sit in armchairs with a rug beneath them and a fireplace, fire stokers, table, cup and papers between them.The translators and staff have been purposely omitted from the shot in order to stage a dialogue and posit a personal relationship between two world leaders. The original photograph depicts the negotiations between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the 1985 Geneva summit. This selected, singular photograph is meant to monumentalize this event. The collages also represent the scene from multiple vantage points through the incorporation of additional photographs (from the Ronald Reagan Library Archive) taken before and after the carefully chosen and widely disseminated iconic photograph, expanding upon the single memorialized moment.
In the art works, the key players in the scene are cut away, and their removal disperses attention to the carefully manipulated mis-en-scene, making it possible to imagine the scene outside of the stabilized narrative of the event. Objects move and repeat in multiple iterations. Abstract shapes taken from the Kurt Schwitters 1943 collage, Difficult, also overlap and intersect with photographed objects in the room. In the exhibition's sculptural collage - created by cutting and pasting digital prints, painting, and drawing on layers of acrylic and then attaching the layers with a resin-based adhesive to create a solid, standing acrylic block - the viewer's physical position in front of the piece shifts the relationship between objects and shapes within the piece, aligning or misaligning them as the viewer moves around the work. In the two-dimensional collages, shapes and objects shift, recombine and repeat throughout, transposing digital, painting, and drawing media.
The art works juxtapose abstract shapes from the Dada collage by Schwitters with photographs of objects from a political scene set in a bourgeois interior at the end of the Cold War and at the beginning of globalized market deregulation and the meshing of market (bourgeois) interests with those of the state. This juxtaposition of political posturing and art elements contemplates in what way such representations and abstractions lure and coddle the bourgeois. Can art create resistance to this "cajoling the nice nice" by imagining new relationships between the political scenario and art devices? This body of work attempts to reinject a representation of stabilized, normalized politics with the potentiality of the political.
Anna Elise Johnson received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2012 and her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2005, with a major in painting and a minor in art history. She was born in Starnberg, Germany, and grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. After completing her BFA, Johnson worked in the arts in Baltimore and Denver and as an assistant to her father, who is also an artist. Afterwards she lived in Berlin, Germany for years and worked as an artist assistant for Julie Mehretu. After completing her MFA at the University of Chicago, Anna Elise was a fellow at the Core Program in Houston, TX. She has exhibited her work across the United States as well as in Berlin and London.