Tra Bouscaren and John Schlesinger
Dear Volunteers
Exhibition: March 07, 2017 - March 31, 2017Opening Reception: March 07, 2017 | 6-8pm
“Installation Art is not a medium for us, but rather an approach through whatever media necessary”.
Tra Bouscaren and John Schlesinger re-animate material artifacts of destruction, addiction, nostalgia, and waste as video-soaked spectacle. Their work exists at the intersection of sculpture and programmed, multi-channel interactive video.
Bouscaren and Schlesinger take the world as a projection of found object/images through which they must act and re-project. Orphaned objects form the material base of their practice. Incorporating demolition rebar, lab equipment, neon, trash casted in epoxy and monumental hand-carved styrofoam sculpture, they program interactive video-mapped environments which envelop and bathe the space using live surveillance footage taken from the gallery itself. By outputting live video of the gallery-goer back onto the material of the exhibition Bouscaren and Schlesinger in turn implicates the viewer back into what they have arrived to judge.
Biography
Tra Bouscaren is a post-disciplinary artist and Lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Trained in Philosophy and Art at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania, he is finishing up his PhD in Media Study at Buffalo. His work has been featured at the Museum für Naturkunde of Berlin, Victor I Fils Gallery in Madrid, Centre Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Fort Mason Center for Art and Culture in San Francisco, Hallwalls in Buffalo, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, and New York’s Lincoln Center. Bouscaren is represented by N2 Gallery in Barcelona.
John Schlesinger is a photographer turned sculptor. He has won a Rome Prize, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Village Voice, Aperture, Bomb Magazine, ARTnews, and the New York Times. Collected broadly, Schlesinger’s output can be found at the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the MoMA.