JOAN KAUFMAN
News from Nowhere

NOVEMBER 3 TO 27, 2010
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, November 6, 2 - 5 PM

“To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world.”
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

A photographic and multi-screen video installation explores the uncontrollable and elusive nature of uncertainty that wallpapers contemporary life. Simultaneously playful and alarming, News From Nowhere offers provocative coping strategies for the unexpected.Fractured surfaces, unpredictable movement and shifting realities underscore the ever-present anxiety of shocking news delivered without warning.

The large-format photographic works support the notion of remaining steadfast in a shifting and precarious world.  Series 1 with its acts of magic, illusion and gender-bending feistiness offers alternative strategies of resistance to unpredictability.  Reflective and intimate, the images in Series 2 hover on the edge, searching out and making small gestures toward somewhere.

The video component of News From Nowhere is a five-screen, five-minute continuously looping installation with sound. Flat-screened monitors, anchored to the ground by steel support structures, form a loose eight-foot diameter circle on the floor. Moving images of black birds on a red background are programmed in sequences that cause a relationship to form between the movement of the birds and the borders/frames of the monitor screens. Birds fly freely from screen to screen while others are trapped within the monitor frame. An unsettling soundscape controls the action. Alternately hypnotic and alarming, the News From Nowhere video project is a meditation on a world turned upside down. Focusing on a fractured interface between the natural world and technology, it simultaneously delivers wonder and uncertainty.

Review of News from Nowhere in the Globe and Mail, Nov 12, 2010.