Michael Joaquin Grey, Reuleaux Tetrahedron, 2008, Courtesy Berkeley Center for New Media.
Michael Joaquin Grey, My Sputnik, 1990, DVD, Aluminum, stainless steel, titanium, kevlar, black velvet, 12 x 8 x 8', Courtesy bitforms gallery.
Michael Joaquin Grey, The Fourth Flavor: The Rise and Fall with Fanta, 2004.
Michael Joaquin Grey, Missed Curious Yellow, 2004. |
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P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue
718-784-2084
Long Island City
Drawing Gallery, first floor
Michael Joaquin Grey
June 28, 2009-September 14, 2009
The work of Michael Joaquin Grey has bridged the boundaries between art, science, media, and the imagination for the last 20 years. His interdisciplinary practice revolves around the development and origins of life and language, as well as morphology. The self organizing principles of living and nonliving things, from muscle cells up to cultural phenomena, are among the diverse concerns that Grey's work examines. Featuring wall vinyl, computational videos, sculptures, and prints, the exhibition investigates critical moments in natural phenomena and culture with a nearly scientific eye, all the while testing the very limits and boundaries of the tools required in such study.
Works on view thematically demonstrate the artist's interest in the development of language, living things, and strategic organic systems. Many works relate to the principles of growth and transformation, as seen in Object as preposition (1988-2007) which visualizes how throughout art history the object became part of a performative process in relational aesthetics. Body signals are a recurrent theme; the human heartbeat is used in Perpetual ZOOZ (2005-09), as well as the artist's own biological material in Artificial Muscle (1983-2001), where a sample of Grey's muscle cells is used to create a contracting mass in a test tube.
The computational cinematic projection Perpetual ZOOZ is the primary work in the exhibition, which incorporates two versions of The Wizard of Oz. One version of the movie plays in time with his mother's heartbeat and the other plays in reverse, in accordance with Grey's heart. The projection is designed in a way that both versions of the movie are presented in a sculptural form, like two sides of a spinning coin.
Michael Joaquin Grey (born 1961 in Los Angeles, California) has a BS degree in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. He is the inventor of ZOOB, an award-winning toy modeling system. His artwork, based around his understanding of genetics, language, and the origins of form, is shown internationally.
For the past 20 years, Michael Joaquin Grey has been creating work that extends and plays with the boundaries of art, science and media. Critical moments in natural phenomenon and culture are objects in his work, as are the prepositional states of change between matter, energy, behavior, and meaning. Grey's creative dialogue engages epistemological and pedagogical creative limitations of the tools and processes we use to observe, learn and play with our world.
Grey's work has been recognized in publications internationally including Artforum, Flash Art, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Leonardo, Artbyte, ID Magazine, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice, London Telegraph, Wired, Zing Magazine, Art & Auction, and The Wall Street Journal.
Michael Joaquin Grey lives and works in San Francisco and New York. He has had solo shows at Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2007), bitforms gallery, New York (2006), Kunsthalle Loppem, Belgium (1995), Lisson Gallery, London (1994), Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York (1991, 1993 and 1994) and has been included in group exhibitions such as Illiterature, Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica (2009), Beneath the Underdog, Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007), CUT/FILM Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, MOCA, North Miami (2004), Public Offerings, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001), 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1993).
Michael Joaquin Grey is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art and Chief Curatorial Advisor, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
Michael Joaquin Grey, Past Proprioception, 2007. |
