Expanding the Presence of Experimental and New Media Arts in the Midwest

UNO Art Gallery features to work of two internationally recognized video installation Artists

Exhibition: Interact: Lynn Lukkas and Cynthia Pachikara

Where: UNO Art Gallery. 6001 Dodge Street, Omaha Nebraska, 68182, First Floor Weber Fine Arts Building

When: January 15 – February 19, 2010, Opening Reception January 15^th 6 – 8 pm, Artist Lecture January 14^th, 7 pm.

Online:
http://www.unoartgallery.org
http://www.lynnlukkas.com
http://sites.google.com/site/cynthiapachikara

About:

The UNO Art Gallery, the Department of Art and Art History and Echotrope are proud to present the exhibition Interact: Lynn Lukkas and Cynthia Pachikara. Interact features work by two of the Midwest’s most prestigious video installation artists.

Lynn Lukkas is a media artist and associate professor of Experimental and Media Arts in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Spanning filmmaking, video installation, interactive media and photography Lukkas works broadly across media and traditions weaving forms and ideas into artworks that elucidate subjective human experience. Employing an aesthetic that creates a phenomenal world of image, sound and immersive physical sensation, Lukkas reaches beyond traditional cinematic narrative to form a new kind of cinematic language, a new kind of cinematic experience.

During the exhibition Interact Lukkas exhibitsTouch Me / Don’t Touch Me, 2009, an interactive digital media installation employing the user’s heartbeat to trigger video and audio projected into two galleries. Touch Me /Don’t Touch Me, is the sixth work in the BioSensor Series begun in 2001. This group of interactive media installations poetically explores phenomenal relationships between mind and body, interior and exterior and emotional and physical human experience.  Housing two interactive user controlled interfaces, the visitor to the gallery is invited to lay their hands on (to touch) the interface. As they do so, their body’s pulse activates the video image, the audio and the text projected into the gallery environment.

By folding and layering the interior experience of the subjective body with the subjects immediate external environment together with the narrative drama unfolding before them in the video and audio, Touch Me /Don’t Touch Me, creates an immersive experience – a new kind of cinematic experience, a new kind of cinematic language. This installation work is interactive stage on which the viewer’s immediate experiences become the focal point in the poetics of consciousness.

Lukkas is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bush Foundation Fellowship and Jerome and McKnight Foundation Fellowships. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including the Walker Art Center’s “Out There Series”, the “Cape Town One City Festival” in South Africa, and at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival.

Much before beginning her art career, Pachikara was trained in architecture and is therefore preoccupied with definitions of “inhabitable space.”  In her shadow installations, Pachikara uses theater lighting techniques to cast viewers’ shadows to the wall.  However, through a trick of light, the spectators are surprised to find video and photographic projections inside the space of their “shadow bodies.”  Moving around the installation, spectators can unveil various permutations of the projected imagery.  By establishing the observer as means for revealing hidden layers of light, Pachikara considers the social contingency of the spectator’s gaze and visualizes the idea of “body-as-screen.”

In the exhibition Interact The UNO gallery will present two of Pachikara’s recent works.  In the installation Vertical Horizon(tal), Pachikara combines moving images of headlights, streetlights, and starlight to create a puzzle about spatial boundaries.  Viewers are invited to interact with the light.  Interact will also be exhibiting the project, Shadow Catching, whereby the artist has been isolating light phenomena from the urban environment and recording it on tape.  In this work, Pachikara re-presents a city using solely shadows caught on site.

Pachikara is currently an Associate Professor of Art & Design at the University of Michigan where she also holds a joint appointment in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.  She has exhibited internationally in venues that include the Mackintosh Museum of Glasgow, Scotland, the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis, Consolidated Works in Seattle, the Fassbender Gallery in Chicago, SPACES in Cleveland, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, and the Ann Arbor International Film Festival.

Echotrope is a nomadic arts group co-founded and co-directed by Jody Boyer and Russ Nordman, both faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  Since 2005 Echotrope’s aim has been to expand the presence of new media contemporary art in the region by exhibiting works in both traditional and nontraditional venues alike.