Past Exhibition

Julien Bismuth
Jan 18–Feb 23, 2008

Opening Reception on January 18th from 7 to 9pm

Performances on January 18th and 25th at 8pm

The Box is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Julien Bismuth a French-born artist who currently lives and works in New York. This exhibition will bring together written text, performance action and visual media creating an exhibition that explores these various artistic mediums and challenges the viewer to experience art in an exploratory way. Viewers will be encouraged to participate in pieces and take some of the textual pieces home with them, enabling them activate the objects. These works not only bring together different media, but they hold a humor and relief that is absent from contemporary art.

One group of works that will be shown in this exhibition are four visual text pieces that were originally inspired by the Sator Square. Titled “Four by Four,” “Man Falls,” and ”Funny Pages,” these pieces invite the viewer to read the narrative paragraphs in any order, allowing the story to develop in multiple ways. These pieces however are not just stories they are also visual compositions of text. The visual cues set the stage, drawing the viewer to contemplative and playful texts. Bismuth has chosen to print these folded works on newsprint, so the viewers can take them home.

In addition to these text pieces, Bismuth will also be exhibiting another sculptural work, titled “The Funniest Sculpture in the World,” which will be activated by two performances. The piece rests on an interaction between the audience and the performer, one, which then inflects and informs the reading of the object on which the performance will take place. A related piece, titled “Specific Object,” consists of an empty pedestal from which an audio recording of a text written by Bismuth will be played. The viewer will be invited to sit on the pedestal and in a sense become a sculpture, while listened to the recorded description of another, far more paradoxical and virtual object. For this piece, Bismuth was partially inspired by the famously combative writings of the artist Donald Judd. Bismuth took inspiration from these texts, playing off of their ambiguities or contradictions, while simultaneously unearthing the sharp humor of Judd’s polemical texts .

In the basement will be a film that Bismuth has made in collaboration with Lucas Anemia will be shown. This film uses images from the New York Times as its visual material, focusing in part on how the press portrays news events to the public. By combining these found images with narratives derived in part from actual newstories, this film brings together multiple events, creating a complex and contemplative narrative. The procedures by means of which Ajemian and Bismuth composed the visual and narrative sequences work to weave familiar headlines or events into a series of complex and baroque mini-narratives, creating a work, which mimics and distorts the numbingly repetitive nature of contemporary news media.

Ajemian will have a solo exhibition opening in the Project Room of Daniel Hug that also opening on the 18th of January at 6pm. Daniel Hug is located at 510 Bernard St. Los Angeles, Ca 90012. Please contact them for more information on this exhibition at www.danielhug.com or call 323 221 0016.

Bismuth an artist who shows regularly with Galerie Parisa Kind in Frankfurt, Germany and Galerie George-Philippe Vallois in Paris, France, studied visual art at UCLA. Bismuth is also currently completing a doctorate degree in Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

The opening reception for this exhibition is January 18th, 2008 from 7 to 9. The performances will take place on the 18th and 25th of January at 8pm.

The Opening

Check out some photographs from the opening here