Curator

Ellen Hartwell Alderman, Katherine Pill, Matias Cuevas

Contributing Artists

Andrew Blackley, Biff Bolen, Michael Hunter, Brookhart Jonquil, Jess Lanham, Thomas Roach, Alice Tippit, Sebastian Vallejo, Kentaro Yamada

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Technology, in myriad forms, has become the artist’s invisible third arm, woven at times imperceptibly onto the most traditional surfaces. Immersion in a world of global communications and digital-imaging technology has lead to new modes of perception in which the boundary between the virtual and the actual have become blurred, and technologies of the past are appropriated so smoothly as to become almost unconsciously present. By allowing an openness to the hybrid, the simultaneous and the mash-up, artists are exploring new aesthetic practices that blend traditional and contemporary technologies, techniques and materials to interrogate timely questions of value, authenticity and the state of contemporary subjectivity. In the works exhibited here, Alice Tippit engages the gap between banal industrial processes and everyday life through a whimsical investigation of the relationship between word and image. Kentaro Yamada’s video gives the mundane task of parallel parking a mathematical beauty, created by a scene of technological precision made possible by the human hand and mental calculation. Biff Bolen’s use of photocopy transfers, however, highlights the fallibility of technology that occurs when the mechanical process is interrupted by human interference. He creates virtual architectural structures that upon close inspection have no place in practical reality. The traditional artist’s canvas has been re-worked by both Thomas Roach and Michael Hunter to hint at a painterly aesthetic without the use of paint. Roach uses a multi-step process of computers, laser and ink-jet printers and silk-screens to
interrogate the position of the canvas as art object, and Hunter creates a canvas-like surface with a tie-dye t-shirt onto which is applied a cotton rug remnant, the remnant itself being the result of an industrial process meant to look like craft. With Third Arm, we hope to demonstrate timely concerns of SAIC artists from a variety of disciplines, in terms of both content and processes that allow for integrated, not simply interdisciplinary, practices.