LACE is proud to present Capsize, a new collaborative installation and performance by Tad Beck and Jennifer Locke. Capsize is curated by Marjorie Vecchio, PhD., and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno. Taking place on an island off the coast of Maine where Beck had spent many summers both as a child and adult, the two artists developed a body of work utilizing objects, landscape and models from this island incorporating Locke’s approach to action/performance and the camera.

Capsize incorporates an unorthodox utilization of materials through performance, upending the normal order of symbolic relations. The elements of each discrete piece (boat/body/water/camera/model/artist) are shuffled and reshuffled into various permutations, and thus function as a matrix supplying terms for the invention of activities and their positioning within the camera’s frame.

Both artists have worked with the male body in the past, each in their own way. For Beck, the erotic potential of the body is usually coupled with absurdist/humorous activities, utilizing eros as a springboard for looking at more abstract notions of repetition, failure, exertion, voyeurism, and the masculine subject. Locke’s utilization is similarly concerned with exertion and the dynamics of looking/voyeurism, but is also particularly concerned with the way that bodies animate and inhabit a space, the ways in which the presence of a camera and/or viewer transforms that body's way of occupying physical space, and in so doing explores architectural themes.

PUBLICATION
Curator Marjorie Vecchio, PhD is collaborating with LACE to publish a catalogue that will include a keynote essay by Jennifer Doyle, PhD and an essay by Grant Wahlquist. The catalogue is sponsored by a generous award from the Hilliard Endowment, the Associated Students of the ...

LACE is proud to present Now he's out in public and everyone can see, an 18-channel video installation by Natalie Bookchin that weaves together found fragments from online video diaries in which vloggers recount a series of media scandals involving African American men. The multiple stories originally circulated and enflamed by networks of corporate media gone viral, intersect around themes of racial and class identity and explore popular attitudes, anxieties, and conflicts about race. Bookchin’s work creates a critical context for otherwise isolated and scatter-shot online voices, drawing links, making connections, and locating tropes between individual rants and responses. The montage produced by the multiple monitors in the gallery mirrors the composite story, of a racialized subject under scrutiny. Where the typical viewer of online video is a single person in front of her screen, the installation produces an active social space where multiple viewers navigate through a media environment, piecing together a fragmented and layered narrative told across space and time.

A major new work by Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see was developed over the past two and a half years and is part of a larger body of work in which Bookchin repurposes videos made and circulated online, giving new social shape and form to individual expression. Previous video works in this series also address current social events and phenomena including joblessness, mood-stabilizing drugs, and DIY dance videos. This newest project is more spatially and conceptually complex, weaving together many more videos, sounds, voices, narratives, and perspectives into three-dimensional space. This further evolution of form reflects and explores the mix of struggles, conflicts, and harmony in some of the critical stories we as a society are telling today about who we are, and what we aspire to be, and represents ...