Anne Wilson & Shawn Decker
MESS

September 4 - October 9, 2008

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St. Paul, MN. August 1, 2008 -- From Thursday, September 4th to Thursday, October 9th, Denler Art Gallery in Saint Paul will be hosting Mess, a collaborative video and sound installation by the artists Anne Wilson and Shawn Decker. This exhibit marks the first time a collaboration by the two artists has been hosted in Minnesota.

Mess is derived from an earlier collaboration between the two artists entitled Errant Behaviors, which debuted at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas in 2004. Errant Behaviors had erstwhile emerged out of Anne Wilson’s vast sculpture Topologies, first displayed at the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York.

Having no beginning or end, the organic stop-motion video cycles through scenes of delicate--yet sometimes monstrous--thread and lace constructions growing, decaying and shifting from state to state. The processes suggest a bodily awkwardness and vulnerability, a poetic analog to the often uncanny transformations of living beings and systems. A certain violence is present in these transformative cycles, tempered by the intimate fragility of the materials performing. Time, also, plays a vital role in the work: the compression of time and labor, manifested in material form. The laborious stop-motion animation process resonates with the slow, repetative crafts the thread and lace make reference to: fibers, textiles, weaving. As with much of Anne Wilson’s work, the piece’s visual vocabulary revises and refreshes the languages of Post-minimalism, Fiber art and Feminism that rose to prominence in art in the late 1960’s and 70’s.

While the visual component of the installation is the work of Wilson, Shawn Decker’s sound composition provides a rich spatial dimension to the piece. Deep, reverberating drones are interrupted by irregular clicks and stutters, an abstract aural landscape to compliment and inform Wilson’s own unsteady organic environment. The work plays on multiple tensions: between the digital and the physical, between intention and accident, micro and macro, order and violence.

The artists released the following statement about “Mess” and their collaboration together for the occasion of the piece’s inaugural showing in the show Takeover at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Illinois. It is a composite of a conversation between the two artists, transformed into poetic verse by the poet Alice George:

Now all the residue of life is being piled in one large heap, collecting to pile way up, and then sucked into the heavens by some mysterious force, sucked up by a shop vacuum. A cycle. A shop vac. It’s short, the distance between our two houses, like walking the dog except I keep going. If we start to sing we hear a power saw, computers beeping. How can all the dark thread dance? Incredibly precise, very delicate in an overwhelming fashion. A huge piano in his front room, she has this table filled with work. Depth cleared away like thoughts in one’s head to make room for new growth. Subside aggressively. Who would arrange sounds like weather around the making? Splinters of wood. Instead of turning, we are very green in warm months, slippery in winter. Then build a song about work and the unwanted. We are singing an idea, mess in mess. Cycle vac, residue in the piano, mysterious studio brain. What is being built is neither known nor destroyed.

A opening reception for the exhibit will be held at the gallery on Thursday, September 4th from 6 to 8 PM. The event will be free and open to the public. For the remainder of its run, the exhibit will be open from 9am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday. For directions and more information on the gallery, please visit art.nwc.edu/denler or contact gallery director Luke Aleckson at lbaleckson@nwc.edu with inquiries.

About the artists:

Anne Wilson is a Chicago based visual artist who creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, and DVD stop motion animations that explore themes of time, loss, private and social rituals. She uses found materials (table linen, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread, and wire) that are familiar and rich with cultural meanings. She has shown extensively -- Wilson’s work was part of the 7-artist exhibition “Out of the Ordinary” at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2007-08 and her solo show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago opened in January 2008. Her work was part of the “Alternative Paradise” exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan in 2005-06. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston hosted a major solo exhibition of Wilson’s art in 2004, and “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings” was presented at MassArt, Boston in 2002, and at the University Art Gallery at San Diego State University in 2003. She was included in the “2002 Biennial” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and her solo exhibition entitled “Anne Wilson: Anatomy of Wear” was presented in 2000 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Wilson’s art is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Museum of Glass, Tacoma; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, among others. Wilson is the recipient of grants from Artadia, the Tiffany Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. Wilson’s work is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Paul Kotula Projects, Detroit. She is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
~from www.annewilsonartist.com

Shawn Decker is a composer and artist who writes music for live performance, electronic tape, and for film and video soundtracks, and works primarily with interactive computer-based performance and with sound and electronic media installations. His work has appeared in a variety of settings ranging from small galleries to large concert halls, and has been heard on NPR, the European Broadcast System, PBS, and the Learning Channel. Recent commissions include the first permanent public sound installation ever installed in Finland, a piece for the Chicago Saxophone Quartet which has been widely performed in the US and Europe, and an interactive live-electronic score for a major work by the Mordine and Company dance ensemble. Mr. Decker also has performed with and composed for the acclaimed new music ensemble KAPTURE. In addition to writing and producing music, Mr. Decker is an Associate Professor in the Art and Technology and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to his creative work, Mr. Decker also writes and lectures, and was recently the chair of the 1997 International Symposium on the Electronic Arts. Mr. Decker received a Bachelor’s degree in music composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Master’s and Doctor’s degrees from the Northwestern University School of Music.
~from www.shawndecker.com

Anne Wilson & Shawn Decker Mess 2006 Video and Sound Installation 81 x 144 inches (projection size) Animator: Cat Solen Post-production Animators and Mastering: Mark Anderson and Daniel Torrente Copyright 2006 Anne Wilson Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.