Rachel Clarke: Awakenings

Rachel c la R ke awakenings

University art Gallery Department of art college of the arts california State University, Stanislaus

500 copies printed

Rachel clarke - awakenings

University art Gallery Department of art college of the arts

california State University, Stanislaus

October 18 - December 17, 2010

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by: associated Students Instructionally Related activities, california State University, Stanislaus

copyright © 2010 california State University, Stanislaus all Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

University art Gallery college of the arts

california State University, Stanislaus One University circle Turlock, ca 95382

catalog Design: kristina Stamper, college of the arts, california State University, Stanislaus catalog Printing: claremont Print and copy, claremont, ca catalog Photography: Sam Parsons

ISBN:

cover Image: Still from Flow, 2010, 3D digital animation with sound.

Director’s Foreword

This exhibition, Rachel clarke, awakenings: In her many projects, Rachel clarke has combined the medias of drawing, video and new media installations. clarke’s work uses themes of both nature and culture and looks at intersections of identity and technology. constantly at the forefront of technology and it’s relentless advances, clarke has constantly pushed the envelope of art. I am very pleased to be able to exhibit her work for others to enjoy.

Many colleagues have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. I would like to thank Rachel clarke for the privilege of exhibiting her amazing work, Mike azevedo and Stephen Blumberg for their outstanding collaborations with Rachel clarke, Sam Parsons for his insightful photography of Rachel clarke’s work, elaine O’Brien for her wonderful essay, college of the arts, california State University, Stanislaus for the wonderful catalog design and claremont Print and copy for their expertise in printing this catalog.

Great thanks is extended to the Instructionally Related activates Program of california State University, Stanislaus and anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De cocker, Director

University art Gallery

california State University, Stanislaus

On Rachel clarke’s Awakening

“I have come to realize that digital technologies, so much less tangible and more mutable than technologies past, are a perfect metaphor for the times we live in….” Rachel clarke

“In dreams begins responsibility.” William Butler Yeats

With this exhibition, Awakening, Rachel clarke invites you to enter the spaces of her mind – her sense of life today – a heightened poetic, political consciousness edged with the hopeful, absurdist fatalism of an artist-master and eternal apprentice of the postmodern sublime. as you experience Awakening, do not imagine that you have crossed a threshold from life to art. The artist will suspend you between them, and between other opposing states of awareness – the subjective and objective, the past and the present, the dream and awakedness – states not of action or conviction but of uneasy provisionality. Bring with you into Awakening’s virtual, material and sound environments your memories of the kinds of places Borges, William Gibson, and other poets of real unreality have taken you; recall thoughts you had there that could have been thought by men and women of any age, and other thoughts that could only be of your own time. For clarke’s new animation, video, and sound installation, Flow, bring as well remembered news images of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster (pictures you will not have forgotten) that have flooded the media and collective consciousness since april 20, 2010. Remember watching.

clarke is a poet of the digital sublime; her art has always played at the borders of the virtual and the real. (about the Somnium [latin for “the dream”] works, for example, she asks with a smile, “The retelling of the dream – can you really get it right?”) But clarke is also a political thinker who feels a responsibility to speak about the all-too-real issues of our time that concern her deeply. Flow, conceivably the final stage of “Awakening,” comes out of the artist’s sense of urgency about environmental destruction heightened by the frustration she felt watching the BP oil disaster as media spectacle, the emotional disconnect of electrical connectivity, the inescapable complicity of us all, the sheer enormity of it. a social role of artists has always been to articulate what is to others inexpressible; new forms are created for the ever new of contemporary experience. “I just had to make this work,” clarke explains. She has no answers to the world’s problems that trouble her, is “unable to make a didactic work,” but she has in hand media of artistic expression that emerged with the computer age and are, we imagine, best able to humanize the astounding creative-destructive forces of global communication, postmodernity, and capitalism; and, as in Flow, the capacity to make those forces comprehensible to individual subjective consciousness. collaborations with audio designer Mike azevedo on the Somnium dream works and with composer Stephen Blumberg on Flow intensify the sense of embodied mood in clarke’s separate but related theaters of mind.

The Mcluhan concept, “the medium is the message,”central to our understanding of media and the information age, is also key to understanding the work of this artist. It is the inherent capacity of new media to represent contemporary experience, “characterized,” in clarke’s view, “by incredible richness of experience, yet by e sound and time. I love the ephemeral quality of it…. I always use drawing, but other than that, coming to new media wa continuous state of instability and change,” that drew her to them in the mid-nineties after earning her BFa in traditional media at Winchester School of art in the Uk and before she began her MFa in electronic art at Southern Illinois University, carbondale, in 1998 (completed in 2001). “I started out in painting and drawing and reached a threshold.” She began to include found objects, then light. When computer technology came in, she says, “I couldn’t believe it. I was able to move ideas so much further, includas the only way I could do layerings of time and transformations.” Since her full-time appointment at Sacramento State in 2001, “in this media everything has completely changed.” clarke likes the fact that it is always changing, that each work requires learning and inventing the very means for its making. “It’s not like traditional practice…. It’s arduous in a different way. I try to make [the artwork] happen by using new means, by trial and error, always pushing new.”

What other artistic media than those clarke deploys can be right for the subjects of an artist whose very titles – Somnium [Dream], Flow, and Awakening – are derived from verbs, nouns suggesting hybrid states of transformation and becoming rather than static being? clarke has imagined and created interstitial spaces for Awakening where virtual and material realities merge. They take us out of ourselves and draw us back in, possibly changed. In Flow you might experience and perhaps share the artist’s own sense of being immersed in the flows of life and the postmodern sublime where “good” and “evil” mingle and change places. You might share something of her desire (however selfironic and questioning) to awaken from the spell of media consciousness, the Plato’s-cave syndrome, where life outside – including the worst suffering of others and the wreckage of nature – is experienced as mere screen entertainment.

In the end there remains the old avant-garde question Awakening inspires, at least in this viewer, as to whether or not any art, and especially art so given to and good at questioning reality, can be where responsibility toward others in the real world begins.

elaine O’Brien Ph.D. Professor of Modern & contemporary art Sacramento State

University

“The

“Somnium”

Rachel e .claRke

rclarke@csus.edu www.rachelclarke.net

EDUCATION

1998 – 2001 Southern Illinois University, carbondale, Il (MFa)

1989 – 1992 Winchester School of art, Winchester, Uk (BFa)

PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS

2001 – present california State University, Sacramento, Department of art: associate Professor, electronic art

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS / PERFORMANCES / SCREENINGS

SOLO AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS

Upcoming: california State University, Stanislaus, art Gallery, Turlock, ca, Oct 2010

Upcoming: Crocker Mosaic, New Media community public artwork commissioned by the crocker art Museum, Sacramento, ca, Sept, 2010

Between, Reynolds Gallery, University of the Pacific, Stockton, ca, Nov 2009

Somnium Redux, Block Gallery, Sacramento, ca, Oct 2008, http://www.blockdowntown.com/exhibit_clarke.html

The Present Moment, center for contemporary art, Sacramento, ca, Sept-Oct 2006, http://www.ccasac.org/ccaSPastexhibitions.htm

A World Away, auburn University art Gallery, auburn, al , Jan 2006

Bio Electric Dot, University Union Gallery, cSU, Sacramento, ca, Sept 2002

GROUP, JURIED & INVITATIONAL EXHIBITIONS

A Changing Surface: Prints in the Age of Digital Media: center for contemporary art, Sacramento, July 2010

Premiering Print Portfolios: Morgan conservatory, cleveland, Oh, Jun – Jul 2010

We’re on Huron: 233 W.huron Street, chicago, Il , Feb 2010

Control_Shift_Option: contemporary Drawing, Space 301, Mobile, al , Mar-May 2009, http://www.space301.com/exhibitions_past.php Southern Graphics council conference exhibition, chicago, Il , 2009

Feeel, american River college, Sacramento, ca, Dec 2008 http://www.sifting.org/Works_by_Jiayi_Young/Feeel .html

Home and Away: Contemporary Video Art, JayJay Gallery, Sacramento ca, Jul 2008 http://www.jayjayart.com/ CSUS Art Department Faculty Show, University library Gallery, cSU, Sacramento, ca, March 2008

The Present Moment 2, art ark New Media Installation, crocker art Museum, Sacramento, ca, aug 2007 – present

The Gold Kitchen, art ark New Media Installation, crocker art Museum, Sacramento, ca, aug 2004 – Jun 2007 Gift Shop, One Year in la Gallery, los angeles, ca, Nov – Dec 2006

Dig It II: A Survey of Recent Digital Art, Gregory kondos Gallery, Sacramento city college, Sacramento, ca, Nov 2006

Drawing Conclusions, Biggin Gallery, auburn University, auburn, al , May 2006 – aug 2006

Endless Forms, Engaging Evolution, Work Gallery, University of Michigan, ann arbor, MI, Mar 2006 Light in the Dark, Space Gallery Portland, Maine, Jan – Feb 2005

The Gold Kitchen, installation, Most Significant Bytes, Mount Union college, alliance, Ohio Nov 18 2004, http://music.muc.edu/msb/ Cut Outs, Ready Mades, Color Fact, JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, Jul 2004

IDEAS Exhibition, iDMaa conference (International Digital Media and arts association) Orlando, Fl , Mar 2004

CSUS Art Department Faculty Show, University library Gallery, cSU, Sacramento, ca, Dec 2003

Marks - an Exhibition of Contemporary Drawing, Target Gallery, alexandria, Va, Nov 2003

Postflesh, University library Gallery, cSU, Sacramento, ca, Dec 2002

DPI, california Polytechnic University, Pomona, ca, Nov 2002

Self, Davis art center, University of california, Davis, ca, May 2002

SCREENINGS & PERFORMANCES

Avatar, video screening at INPORT – International Video-Performance art festival, Tallinn estonia, Dec 2005

Avatar, video screening at VaD Video and Digital arts Festival, Girona, Spain, Nov 2005

Skirr Performances

live performance at california State University, chico, ca, 2nd alfred loefler New Music Symposium, Feb 10 2006

live performance (opening concert) at Festival of New Music, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Feb 3 2005live performance, empyrean ensemble, at Mondavi center, Davis, ca, Nov 2003

live performance, empyrean ensemble, at cSU Sacramento, Festival of New american Music, Nov 2003

Skirr Screenings

Screening, Remote lounge, Bowery, NYc, 23 Jul 2005

Screening at Light in the Dark, Space Gallery Portland, Maine, Feb 10 2005

Screening at SAND 2004, Swansea Institute, Swansea, Wales, Uk , 27 Nov 2004

Screening at Euphoria, The Brick house Gallery, Sacramento, Jun 2004

Screening at SFaI International Film / Video Festival (Jurors’ citation), San Francisco art Institute, ca, February 2004

CURATORIAL

Home and Away: Contemporary Video Art, JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, ca, http://www.jayjayart.com/, Jul 2008 Light and Presence, center for contemporary art, Sacramento, ca, March 2008

Postflesh, University library Gallery, cSU Sacramento, ca, Dec 2002 – March 2003

COMMISSIONS & AWARDS

Sacramento arts and Business council of Sacramento’s Artist of the Year award, 2008

New Faze Development, Sacramento: public artwork selected for Marysville Blvd, Sacramento (not yet realized due to New Faze budget issues), 2007 The Present Moment 2, commissioned by the crocker art Museum for the Art Ark, 2007

The Gold Kitchen commissioned by the crocker art Museum for the Art Ark, 2004 Jurors’ citation for Skirr, SFaI International Film / Video Festival, San Francisco art Institute, ca, February 2004 Skirr commissioned by empyrean ensemble, 2003

Joint Women’s Studies and University Women’s Professional advancement Juried competition, for a grant proposal, Artist’s Book, Digital Book and CD-Rom, Southern Illinois University, Illinois, USa, Dec 2000

artwork published in Hurricane Alice, cultural journal spring edition 2000

Joint Women’s Studies and University Women’s Professional advancement Juried competition, for a grant proposal, The Gendered Body, Digital Prints and Publishing, Southern Illinois University, Illinois, USa, Feb 1999

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

University of california San Diego library, 2006 crocker art Museum, 2010

PUBLICATIONS & REVIEWS

artwork featured in Art Ltd “Sacramento Rising”, David M. Roth, Sept/Oct 2008

Review in the Sacramento Bee, “Moving Pictures: the Video art exhibit at JayJay offers a Rare Gallery experience”, Victoria Dalkey, July 25, 2008 Feature in Sacramento Magazine, “40 Under 40”, cathy casinos- carr, Jan 2008

Review in the Sacramento Bee, “Now and Zen”, Victoria Dalkey, Oct 6, 2006

Review in The Auburn Plainsman “Digital art ‘a world away’ from conventional art on the Plains”, ashley hungerford, Jan 19 2006 Review in Rhizome, “let ’s call it art: caa Recognizes the New Media caucus”, Juliet Davis, Mar 5, 2005 Abstracts 2005, caa atlanta “Screenshots and audio effects: electronic events”, caa, 2005

Review in The Portland Phoenix “We are Moths”, Maggie knowles, Jan 21, 2005 Feature in Sacramento Bee, “art To Go”, Patricia Beach Smith, aug 22, 2004

Feature in Sacramento Bee, “Inspiration abounds for New Music Festival”, Patricia Beach Smith, Nov 2 2003 Feature in Sacramento News and Review, “Whim vs. Rigor”, Jackson Griffith Volume 15, Issue 32, Nov 6 2003 Review in Artweek, “Postflesh”, David M. Roth, april 2003 Volume 33 Issue 3, april 2003

Review in Sacramento Bee, “Merging with Machines”, Victoria Dalkey, Feb 23 2003 Feature in Iride magazine, “Postflesh”, Giancarlo Pagliasso, Feb 2003

Interview on Livewire TV show, access TV Sacramento, Jan 2003

LECTURES, RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS & PANELS

Panel co-chair with claudia hart for “Under Fire: 3D animation Pedagogy and Industry complicity in New-Media education” (panelists: Jennifer Steinkamp, Bruce Wands, Michael Rees, Joshua Mosley, Greg little and Shane Mecklenberger), college art association annual conference, chicago, Il, Feb 2010 University of the Pacific, Stockton, ca, artist lecture, Nov 30, 2009 University of california, Davis, ca, artist lecture to Graduate Seminar, May 27, 2008 center for contemporary art, Sacramento, ca, artist lecture, Sept 7 2006 University of San Diego, IcaM (interdisciplinary computing in the arts) “current Practice” lecture Series, Jun 1 2006 Northeastern University, Boston, Ma : “creative alchemy: Recent collaborations”, Feb 23 2006 art Department, auburn University, auburn, al : artist lecture, Jan 10, 2006

Jule collins Smith Museum of Fine art, auburn University, auburn, al : “Internet art and censorship”, Jan 12, 2006 lecture presentation for cSUS art alumni chapter, “Past, Present, Future”, Jun 6 2005

co-chair of New Media caucus Panel “Screenshots and audio effects: electronic events”, College arts association conference, atlanta, Feb 2005 lecture presentation, “Skirr ”, Uc Berkeley composition colloquia, april 30 2004

Panelist, “constructing Boundaries: approaches to the Discourse of New Media aesthetics” New Media caucus Panel, college arts association conference, Seattle, Feb 21 2004

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

editor in chief, media-N (international online journal of the college arts association New Media caucus) ISSN: 1942-017X, Feb 2005-present http://newmediacaucus.org/journal/

Vice President, caa New Media caucus, Feb 2005-present Member of the executive committee, New Media caucus Reviewer for leonardo Journal, March 2008-present

aRTIST STaTeMeNT

I was born the same month and year that the first Internet message was sent, yet I was barely aware of digital technologies when I was young – computers in school consisted of writing code that made a fluorescent green word loop infinitely, flickering on a single-color monitor. I became an art major and studied drawing and painting. Then in the mid 1990s I first saw a complex, pixilated image being manipulated on a multicolor cRT screen, and it was a revelation to discover that in less than a decade consumer-grade digital technology had advanced from that monochrome scroll of words into enabling visually/computationally complex tasks involving millions of multicolored pixels. I was attracted by the image quality and the radiant glowing color, but something more was happening, something clicked inside of me about what digital technology could mean as an art form.

I began by learning imaging software so I could make my first digital artworks, and it did what I wanted it to do. Gradually I understood more clearly what it was that I was going after: it was the almost alchemical and shape-shifting properties of the digital medium and the possibilities for fluid and infinite transformation. Manifested as images, words or sounds, digitized information could be manipulated in time, space and motion in ways that had not been affordable, available or even possible before. The artistic potential was limitless.

There arrived a point where I “became” a new media artist, where I knew that this medium allowed me to express fluidly concepts I couldn’t fully realize with any other medium. My aesthetic language also grew to embrace the new possibilities afforded to me by different softwares and hardwares that became available as the digital revolution gained momentum. as I grew in knowledge and understanding I expanded my exploration, making digital videos and animations as well as interactive and participatory works, such as installations that required a visitor’s presence or input to come alive. Dynamic and responsive behaviors possible through interactive digital processes meant permeating the literal barriers between artist and viewer, opening the way to previously impossible collaborative, participatory and immersive experiences.

eventually, the utopianism that colored my early experiences of technology grew into to a richer, more complex understanding of new-media art practice and the social/cultural context that made it possible. Increasingly multi-layered relationships with digital technologies were developing in all aspects of society through the late years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st – within an incredibly short space of time digital technologies literally transformed society, to the extent that they are now embedded into every aspect of life and are inseparable from our behavior and experiences on personal, social, cultural and global levels. The connectedness of networked culture, the stress of unceasing change, the adaptations that technologies demand; the new ways of seeing, experiencing and understanding the world, are mirrored and explored in my art practice.

Over the years I have created a specific personal relationship with the medium, and have developed a hybrid artistic and technical language accumulated though the knowledge of software and hardware that has been learned, adopted, abandoned, purchased, sold, updated, outmoded. The digital artist does not work in a stable environment of known tools and predictable long-term outcomes, the landscape is unstable and prone to seismic shifts, sometimes gradual and sometimes sudden. The technological innovations that have enabled my practice have been developed to meet other needs, such as military and corporate imperatives, and have simply trickled down and been adapted, subverted or misused to create art.

I have come to realize that digital technologies, so much less tangible and more mutable than technologies past, are a perfect metaphor for the times we live in – times characterized by incredible richness of experience, yet by a continuous state of instability and change, and an increasing sense of uncertainty. The fragility of our lives is highlighted by looming economic and environmental crises and ongoing war – our global problems seem huge, complex and insoluble. My work is about examining the experience of a life imbued with technology, and through the digital medium I strive to find form and meaning that express my sense of time and place – a mix of the personal, local and global – as I uncover the ephemeral beauty and instability of life itself.

Rachel clarke, July 2010

ackNOWleDGeMeNTS

california State University, Stanislaus

Dr hamid Shirvani, President

Dr. James Strong, Provost/Vice President of academic affairs

Mr. Daryl Joseph Moore frsa, Founding Dean, college of the arts

Ms. Susana Gajic-Bruyea, Vice President for University advancement Department of art

Dr. Roxanne Robbin, chair, Professor

Dean De cocker, associate Professor

Jessica Gomula, associate Professor

David Olivant, Professor

Gordon Senior, Professor

Richard Savini, Professor

Dr hope Werness, Professor emeritus

christian hali, Instructional Support Technician II

Jon kithcart, equipment Technician II

University art Gallery

Dean De cocker, Director

Special thanks to Ramon S. Nacion for assistance in the installation of the exhibition.