The Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal
Center for Art and Visual Culture, UMBC, Baltimore, MD
Curated by Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching
October 20, 2005 -- December 17, 2005,
Opening Reception October 20th from 5 - 7pm
Organized by the Center for Art and Visual Culture, The Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal is a major traveling exhibition featuring twenty eight contemporary artists whose work employs modern communication technologies (photography, film, video, computers, radio, internet, and digital media) to explore culturally inbred questions / superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own.
Today, the amount of attention devoted to paranormal phenomena such as UFOs, demonic possession, psychics, and ghosts in the media indicates that photography 's early fascinations have not disappeared. Millennial angst, bewildering leaps of science, wildly improbable technological inventions, and ever-decreasing wilderness as human sprawl grows exponentially, makes other worlds once again appear possible, even probable, and definitely alluring. Our escalating desire to prove the existence of another dimension (no matter which one) is linked to photography, with its history of providing us with our proofs. Seduced by the invisible in the face of the medium's relentless and dull dependence upon the physical, photography as a tool of fact (in science), fantasy (in spirit photography), and invention (in the hands of artists) is exploring new frontiers once again.
Included in the exhibition are: Mark Amerika, Zoe Beloff, Diane Bertolo, Jeremy Blake, Corrine May Botz, Susan Collins, Gregory Crewdson, Paul DeMarinis, Spencer Finch, Ken Goldberg, Susan Hiller, Marko Maetamm, Miya Masaoka, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Mariko Mori, Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark, Paul Pfeiffer, Fred Ressler, John Roach, Ted Serios, Leslie Sharpe, Chrysanne Stathacos, Thomson & Craighead, Suzanne Treister, and Anne Walsh & Chris Kubick
Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal will be accompanied by a 200 page fully illustrated catalogue with essays on the significance of paranormal and the supernatural in contemporary culture by Lynne Tillman, associate professor and writer-in-residence at the University at Albany, and Marina Warner, novelist and former scholar at the Getty Center for History of Art and Humanities. Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching, co-curators of the exhibition, will contribute extensive essays on the interplay between science, art, and the occult as it relates to the artworks in the exhibition. The publication will contain over eighty illustrations in color and black and white as well as a checklist for the exhibition, illustrated timeline, and a bibliography. Published by the Center for Art and Visual Culture, as the ninth title of its Issues in Cultural Theory series, Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal will be distributed internationally by Distributed Art Publishers (DAP), in New York (http://www.artbook.com/)
The exhibition website is: http://www.bluroftheotherworldly.com
The press release can be viewed at: http://www.umbc.edu/NewsEvents/rele ases//archives/2005/10/umbcs_center_fo_3.Html (includes images and video clips)
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
jane d. marsching
554 poplar street
roslindale, MA 02131
617-325-2088 home
617-763-8627 cell
jane@janemarsching.com
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
