Don't Need A Weatherman
to know which way the wind blows
The EXIT Room at The Mills Gallery
Date: Feb 1, 2008- Mar 30, 2008
Maura Jasper, a Boston-based artist featured in DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN at
the Mills Gallery EXIT Room, will deliver a talk about her work on
Thursday March 6 @ 6 pm
Using the famous Bob Dylan quote as a title, Don’t Need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows presents works by two artists dealing with weather as an emotional state rather than mere meteorology. Beyond the romantic assumption that agitated weather mirrors a restless soul, the videos in this exhibit register the tension between nature and culture, facts and emotions, personal memories and atmospheric conditions.
Joanna Malinowska’s video In Search of the Miraculous…Part II, 2005, captures the desolated image of a boom box placed in the vast arctic desert of Canada (Baffin Island), incessantly playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The soundtrack of this piece is the unique combination of the Bach score performed by the obsessive Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and the perpetual intrusion of the gelid wind blowing. The boom box is powered by solar batteries, which due to the varying amount of sunlight they receive, often break up and distort the sound making the struggle for beauty even more dramatic, and literally cold.
In Weather You Remember, 2008, Maura Jasper discloses the connections between social understating of climate and personal memories. This project started as an online collection of “weather reports” delivered by senior citizens, as they recall and comment on weather for the location they most identify as home. Weather You Remember is an on going project initiated by Jasper while she was an artist in residence at the Berwick Institute. In this video incarnation, participants consider the cultural, climate, social, economic and other changes they have experienced as variables to determine the weather conditions. As a result, weather becomes the representation of an internal, personal landscape.
Maura Jasper is a multimedia artist based in Boston, MA. Jasper’s work investigates how pop cultures and histories shape and inform identity. She has exhibited and screened work widely in the United States and overseas, including at Artist's Space, Threadwaxing Space, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Centre for Contemporary Images in Geneva. She is co-founder of Punk Rock Aerobics, the DIY workout. Currently she is a graduate student at Massachusetts College of Art's Studio for Interrelated Media. In 2007, Jasper was artist in residence at the AIR program at the Berwick Research Institute, Boston.
Joanna Malinowska works primarily in video and performance. She has explored the iconic fascination of disparate musicians such as pianist Glenn Gould, composer John Cage, and Elvis Presley in different contexts and events. Malinowska’s work has been exhibited internationally. In 2006/7 she was artist in residence at the Smack Mellon Artists Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY. Malinowska is represented in New York by Venetia Kapernekas Gallery, where she had her first solo show in New York, Umanaqtuaq, in 2007
This exhibition, organized by José Luis Blondet, curator of visual arts at the BCA, is a tangential comment on the topic explored in the exhibition at the main gallery Greed, Guilt, and Grappling.
Both exhibits are on view from February 1st- March 30th, 2008 at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts.
The opening reception is Friday, February 1st at 6 pm and is free and open to the public.
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