Error during command authentication.

Art21 and The New York Public Library present

A Video Screening and Live Conversation with
Allan McCollum and Josiah McElheny

Tuesday October 6, 2009
6:00 p.m.

South Court Auditorium

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
476 Fifth Avenue
5th Avenue and 42nd Street
New York , NY 10018
212-340-0871
directions

www.nypl.org
www.art21.org

South Court Auditorium opens to public at 5:30 p.m.
All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation.

On the eve of the fifth-season premiere of the Peabody Award winning PBS television series art:21 — Art in the Twenty-first Century, a conversation with Season Five featured artist Allan McCollum and Season Three artist Josiah McElheny will be preceded by a screening of McCollum’s segment. He is best known for creating large quantities of nearly identical-yet still unique-component objects, which then constitute a single work of art.

Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles in 1944. In his twenties, McCollum briefly considered a career in theater, then attended trade school to study restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. In the late 1960s, he began to educate himself as an artist. Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum’s installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time. Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, comprised of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity. His drawings and sculptures often serve a symbolic purpose—as surrogates, faithful copies, or stand-ins for people—and are presented theatrically, transforming the exhibition space into a laboratory where artifice and context are scrutinized. Economical in form, yet curious in function, his work and mechanical-looking processes are infused with humor and humility. Allan McCollum has had more than 100 solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, where his work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (most recently in 2007); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004), among others. He has also participated in many international exhibitions, most recently at the Bienal de São Paulo (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include Friedrich Petzel Gallery , New York (2009); Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston (2008); and Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2006), among others.

Josiah McElheny was born in Boston , Massachusetts in 1966, and lives and works in Brooklyn , New York . He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and apprenticed with master glassblowers Ronald Wilkins, Jan-Erik Ritzman, Sven-Ake Caarlson, and Lino Tagliapietra. McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. Whether recreating miraculous glass objects pictured in Renaissance paintings or modernized versions of nonextant glassware from documentary photographs, or extrapolating stories about the daily lives of ancient peoples through the remnants of their glass household possessions, Josiah McElheny’s work takes as its subject the object, idea, and social nexus of glass. Influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, McElheny’s work often takes the form of ‘historical fiction’—which he offers to the viewer to believe or not. Part of McElheny’s fascination with storytelling is that glassmaking is part of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation, artisan to artisan. In “Total Reflective Abstraction” (2003-04), the mirrored works themselves refract the artist’s self-reflexive examination. Looking at a reflective object becomes a metaphor for the act of reflecting on an idea. Sculptural models of Modernist ideals, these totally reflective environments are both elegant seductions as well as parables of the vices of utopian aspirations. Recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant (2006), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995) and the 15th Rakow Commission from the Corning Museum of Glass, McElheny has had one-person exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery , Seattle ; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , Boston ; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco ; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela. His work has been exhibited at SITE Santa Fe and the Whitney Biennial (2000).