Sound Giving Will Feeling
(an insistent entity reached)
Andrea Geyer
A Space Main Gallery
April 13 – May 25, 2013
Essay by: Vivian Ziherl
Copresented by: Images Festival
Artist Talk with Andrea Geyer: Friday April 12th at 3 PM in the Images Hub, Urban Space Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Ground Floor
The Images Festival runs from April 11 – 20, 2013. www.imagesfestival.com
The New York City-based artist Andrea Geyer will present a group of new works developed from her research on the repressed, yet insistently present history of women in the development of the early Modernist project. Drawings, diagrams and videos allow viewers to reflect on the influential work done by these early Modernists. For example, 50 of 300 artists in the groundbreaking 1913 Armory show were women, as were many funders of the show. Abby Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Sullivan (MoMA), Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Hilla Rebay (Guggenheim), Helen Clay Frick and Katherine S. Dreier (Société Anonyme) founded the institutional pillars of Modernism in New York City. Women wrote, painted, curated, organized, drew, danced, sang, protested and raised money. The financially fluent supported those with a cause. They met in salons, exhibitions, on boats out on the Atlantic, in speakeasies, at dinner tables, in bars and on the street. It was their work that allied them across class separations and cultural backgrounds. Futurism, political reform, feminism, cubism, birth control, blues and women’s suffrage linked them inextricably together in one of the most exciting and creative moments of the 20th century. Yet Geyer’s new works don’t simply offer a revisionist history of the Modernist project. They also insist that the tireless work, spirit and convictions that drove these women to create a cross-pollinating and far-reaching network across art, politics, education and social reform remains present wherever we closely look today. Her works invite us to rethink time, to liberate it from ideologically framed histories and discover it as a radical non-linear presence and source of potential that continuously surrounds us.
Biographies
Andrea Geyer lives and works in New York. She uses both fiction and documentary strategies in her image and text based works. Her works are temporal translations of specific social and political situations that address larger concepts such as national identity, gender, and class in the context of the ongoing re-adjustment of cultural meanings and social memories. Recent works include Comrades of Times, a series of video vignettes in which young women embody texts originating in the Weimar Republic invoking a political imaginary that resonates strongly with the current political climate; Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, a six-channel video engaging the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961) and the questions it raised about the relationship of truth and justice and the responsibility an individual carries within a nation state; and Spiral Lands, a photographic and textual historiography of the ongoing dispossession of lands from Indigenous people by colonization, governmentality, and capitalist development that constitute one of the longest struggles for social justice in North America. Geyer’s exhibitions include: MoMA, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art/New York; Artist Space/New York; RedCat/Los Angeles; TATE Modern/London; Serpentine Gallery/London; Generali Foundation/Vienna; Secession/Vienna; Witte De White/Rotterdam; the Turin Biennale/Italy; Athens Biennale/Greece; and documenta12/Kassel. She is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander/Cologne. Her books include History is Ours with Sharon Hayes (Kehrer/Nürnberg, 2009); Audrey Munson, The Queen of the Artists’ Studios (Art In General/New York, 2007), and Spiral Lands / Chapter 1 (Koenig Books/London, 2008). Andrea Geyer held a Museum of Modern Art Artist Research Residency in 2012 and 2013, which is supported by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation. Andrea Geyer, Three Chants Modern, 2013 was commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation. www.andreageyer.info
Vivian Ziherl (Brisbane/Amsterdam) is Curator at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution, an institution dedicated to exploring performance and performativity in contemporary art. Her recent projects include “StageIt!” (2012-13) – a performance series co-curated with Hendrik Folkerts at Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); “Landings” (2013-14) – a research project that seeks cross-over readings of land history, geomorphology, rurality and corporeality initiated with Witte de With (Rotterdam); “A Present In Print” (2012) – a summer workshop, seminar and exhibition with If I Can’t Dance at the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Festival; and “Fluiten in het Donker” with de Appel Curatorial Programme (2010-11) at de Appel Boys’ School. Vivian is editor of The Lip Anthology co-published by Kunstverein Publications and MacMillan Press. Her writing has appeared in periodicals including Frieze (London), LEAP Magazine (Beijing), Metropolis M (Amsterdam) and Eyeline (Brisbane) as well as the Journal of Art (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand).