artist installations

Patterson Beckwith
His relational/interactive "Portrait Studio" project uses Polaroid positive-negative materials. Visitors are invited to have their picture taken and they receive the Polaroid positive and Beckwith produces books from the negatives. Over the past three years he has set up dozens of such sessions, including the Armory Show in 2004 at Colin Deland’s American Fine Arts booth. Every portrait studio has an originally designd background (or set) and props. These suggestive environments are meant to invite the sitter to participate in the construction of their image by acting or interacting with the set-up they are being photographed in. As he has refined his environments, the setups have become more elaborate and more demanding of the sitter. Most recently they involve black backdrops with which allows double-exposures of people interacting with themselves. Patterson Beckwith received art degrees from Cooper Union and UCLA. He was a member of Art Club 2000 which was founded in 1992 by Gallerist Colin De Land and students from NYC's Cooper Union. Their collaborative projects included muckraking investigations of systems and institutions including the Gap, Ikea, New York real estate, and Fashion. His installations have been performed in many group shows in New York, Scotland, Rome, Basel and Pittsburgh.

Victor Cartagena
We all feel the need to cry or laugh. Alone, in the presence of others or often in a collective way we express our fear, anger, sadness, elation or complete joy through crying, an expressive trait that recognizes human beings particularly, or through laughing, an expression we share with many representatives of the animal kingdom. In laughing and crying there is an incredible depth and breadth of emotion I am interested in exploring and interpreting along with the viewing audience, who bring their own sorrows and lived lives to the process. This project was a collaboration with actress Lia Zobrafou. Salvadoran-born Victor Cartagena has been making art in the SF Bay Area for more than a decade. The work that Cartagena produced in the early to mid-1990’s battled with memories of the violence in El Salvador and the pain and separation that he experienced in relocating to the U.S. Cartagena has moved beyond solely articulating the immigrant experience and tackles numerous social issues in the U.S. such as consumer culture, homelessness, and material waste. His artistic palette has also branched out to include sculpture, audio and video. Using time, space, and seemingly incoherent mechanisms, Victor creates unions between symbols that function at a practical level to inspire the viewer to question cultural, economic, and political topics as they relate to issues of individual identity.

Carolyn Ryder Cooley
As a performance and installation artist, Ryder Cooly is engaged in a process of developing emotionally driven narrative spaces for viewers to enter into and explore. Abandoned places, found objects and the mysterious lives of animals and insects inform my work. Her creative practice is multi-faceted, ranging from painting to installation, from music to motion picture. She loves to explore, collect things and invent fantasy narratives based on everyday occurrences. Stains, frays and evidence of time are beautiful to her. By using old and layered materials, and layered imagery, she endeavors to engage viewers on multi-sensory levels that alter their experience of time and place. She received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in sculpture in 1993. She has been an active member of the San Francisco Arts Community, exhibiting and performing in local & international venues including: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts & Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, New Image Arts in Los Angeles, Anno Domini Gallery in San Jose/CA, "Sama-Sama, You're Welcome" mural exchange in Indonesia & Cesta Arts Collective in the Czech Republic.

Michael Garlington
Photocar is a group of six young artists on a transcontinental odyssey in search of revelations about the real America. For several years San Francisco photographer, Michael Garlington has traveled cross country in Volkswagen sedans covered with black and white portraits of subjects ranging from the sublime beauty of ingénues to the unique visages of society’s outcasts. Photocar will be accompanied by a documentary film crew to record the group’s interaction with a diverse cast of the ordinary and the extraordinary: factory workers, beekeepers, gandy dancers, circus performers, alligator wrestlers, urban sculptors, poets and panhandlers. Photocar is a magnet that draws people to the camera. This year’s trip will be bigger than ever and the van will be covered with photographs taken on the previous Photocar trips. Starting in San Francisco in September it ends in October in Manhattan for photo new york. Garlington, using a 4X5 camera, shoots whatever catches his eclectic eye, from a sideshow contortionist to a Dairy Queen waitress. Much of his work involves fantasy themes, some ethereally beautiful, others darkly disturbing, but all characterized by a deeply felt empathy for the human condition. Garlington's work is in the collections of Yale University, Dartmouth College, Mt. Holyoke College, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa county, and in the permanent collection of the Minnesota Institute of Arts. He will have a one-man show at the Institute in 2007.

Tracey Snelling
In the installation "Convenient," travel, road trips, and the stops along the way are explored. A projection combines real video with green screen and animation techniques to illustrate a place along the highway, with the conveniences that one needs when stopping: gas, food, and lodging. Through the windows of the motel sculpture, people can be seen doing what they do at motels. The drive-in sculpture plays a dvd "A Long Trip," which again illustrates the constant movement of a long journey from state to state, motel to motel. “Convenient” is a tribute to both the thrill and mundanity of road travel.Influenced by film, landscape, books, and architecture, Tracey Snelling explores reality and scale through the use of sculpture, photography, and video. Mood, time, and a sense of place are captured and distorted. Old buildings, such as motels, are painstakingly recreated in small three-dimensional scale, with dust and weeds surrounding still-blinking neon signs. These sculptures are then photographed, videotaped, or transformed in other ways to further collapse the original object or place that is represented. Often, sound, smell, water, lights, or motors add to the experience of the works. Snelling’s works are featured in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, California, the Microsoft Collection in Redmond, Washington, the Progressive Collection in Cleveland, Ohio, and other institutional and private collections.

Kal Spelletich
Kal Spelletich, the seventh of nine children, was born in an elevator and raised in Davenport Iowa, recently named "America's Worst Place to Live” has been a pioneer in new media arts for over 20 years. His work envelopes the dichotomy of a post-production consumer landscape with the integration of high-tech components, resulting in work that is interactive and changing based on the viewer’s experience. His urban forms instinctively cause his audience to re-examine the purpose of art, both at a raw, and highly sophisticated level. In addition to numerous prestigious awards and grants, Kal Spelletich is honored to have his work in many private and institutional collections, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Unholy Erection
Unholy Erection’s large scale digital collages reveal the psychological landscape of its fictional collaborators, Johnnie B. Smooth and the B-Dazzler. Their work touches upon themes of the human condition including mortality, humility, and love. Seemingly disparate icons, textures and messages are melded together to suggest a dreamlike state which could be seen as advertisements from the subconscious. Their process involves revisiting and recycling imagery and content created over a span of 11 years. Since 1994, Unholy Erection has been working with photography, video, poetry, music, books, and the internet. Their work has been exhibited in numerous group shows including The Next Big Thing at the Detroit Museum of New Art, the Wexner Center For the Arts in Columbus, Ohio and is in private collections in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For further information, visit their website: www.unholyerection.com

Rafael Fuentes
Rafael Fuentes constructs intricate light-space installations using found industrial materials. These discarded items, including glass windshields, mirrors, television monitors, are draped with the soft fabric and plastics of various textures. The resulting assemblage becomes the field for his light projections and photography. Photographic images projected into this post-industrial sculpture create colorful, swirling forms that produce surreal, abstract photographs. The sublime finds new form amidst the lattice metal structures, jagged glass shards, broken tree branches, Aztec masks, human faces or bathing figures. A native of Mexico City, Fuentes’ photographs are richly textured tapestries of light, color, reflection and melting forms, plucked from the drift and decay of the industrial landscape. At photo new york, Fuentes will use white scrim material to create a three dimensional construction that will serve as a screen for slide projections of his colorful abstract photography. Mr. Fuentes was born in Mexico City in 1975 and now lives and works in California. He has performed in numerous public venues in New York, California and Canada. His installation is presented by KBP in Williamsburg.

Wang Wei
Wang Wei takes inspiration both from personal experience and social phenomena. In his photography-based installation “1/30 sec. Underwater,” he recalls a boyhood game of who could hold one’s breath the longest. Visitors to the installation are invited to walk upon backlit transparencies that depict the artist’s face pressed under glass, and underwater. Vague gurgling sounds place the visitor with the unfortunate swimmer. “I want it to be a playful and interesting experience … and make people a bit uncomfortable at the same time,” says the artist. Wang Wei lives and works in Beijing, China. He exhibits internationally, and his work is presently on view in “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China" at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, curated by Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips. In 2005 he was also included in the Prague Biennial. He is represented in the U.S. by Walsh Gallery, where he will show a new installation in January 2006.