The Tools of Culture

Marcin Berdyszak

Scott Kildall

Patrick Lichty

Second Front

Tools Of Culture is a collaboration of three artists: Marcin Berdyszak (Poznan/Poland), Scott Kildall (San Francisco) and Patrick Lichty (Chicago/New Orleans). The exhibition is a part of the Chicago October Artists’ Month themed celebration "Creative Alliances."

In their works these three artists reflect on contemporary culture, technology, and the media and its impact on how our identities are constructed. Their differing perspectives, as being European or American, create an interesting dialogue and examine the various ways we can interpret and view our contemporary digital culture. As a result, the viewer walks away questioning the difference between public and private space, as well as the differences between personal and national identities and locations.

MARCIN BERDYSZAK’S sculptural installation Constitution is a reconstruction of a room in his house in Poland filled with the United European symbols.

Creating a space of contradictions between new and old realities in Europe, his works are not connected with the dialogue of material space because their real space is time.

The artist, though he creates the objects that are intuitively connected with such notions as sculpture or object, much more often refers to the tradition of painting.

SCOTT KILDALL presents Uncertain Location, 2007, a video/print installation. In the summer of 2006, NASA announced that the tapes documenting the Apollo 11 moon landing were missing. The video broadcast on television was transmitted through space and then shot off a video monitor from Houston Ground Control, though no one has seen then this footage.

Using rented space suits from a prop house in Hollywood, Uncertain Location recreates a 1-minute segment from the original moonwalk on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. With the spacecraft in the background, two astronauts attempt to raise the American flag. Each exhibition is a takeaway print performance, and a series of prints have been made from the frames of the video. A representative gives away the prints to the public as they mark their names on a contact sheet. As they walk away with the images, the corresponding frames are scrubbed from the recreated video.

PATRICK LICHTY will present Technical Difficulties, a series of recent and never before seen objects, videos, and print works that probe the boundaries between art history and digital culture. These include Child Worker Shoes/NikeID (From Filterhack), La Cage aux Folles, Northern Deep-Fried Paik, and Valise in an IPod, which play with the concept of the readymade in the era of DIY (Do-it-Yourself) culture.

These works incorporate created shoes that criticize the use of child labor, the hacking of childhood detritus with live video generators, and through the portable media artist’s “Museum.” Print works will also refer to historical traces through Lichty’s New Masterwork Proofs made from interventions in the online virtual world, Second Life. These continue the artist’s investigation of personal identity in a historical context with three large-format prints, Cicciolina as Venus, The Second Supper, and Man as Odalisque with (Real) Slave. All of these works play with identity, materiality, and historical context in terms of a digital culture that makes all these recently non-negotiable concepts highly malleable.

Second Front will present COREDUMP, video selections from their recent video anthology, Second Front’s First Second DVD. Shown on dual video monitors, Second Front references cultural situations from Cocteau’s Wedding on the Eiffel Tower to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The dual displays will create a dialogue between pieces chronicling the group’s virtual performances over the past year.

MORE ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Marcin Berdyszak was born in 1964. The artist graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Poznan, Poland received a MFA in Painting at Professor Wlodzimierz Dudkowiak’s Studio and MFA in Sculpture at Prof. Maciej Szankowski’s Studio in Fine Arts Academy in Poznan, in 1988. Presently, he is the professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Poznan. His works have been presented among others in Poland, Slovakia, the United States, Japan, Finland, Mexico, Germany, Sweden and Great Britain. He is in many private and museum collections worldwide.

Scott Kildall graduated with a M.F.A in Art and Technology Studies from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. He also has a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Brown University. Currently he lives and works in San Francisco. Kildall is a video artist and performer working at the intersection of cultural memory and the psychology of desire. He sees himself as a gatherer, creator and editor, collecting media such as voicemails from personal ads, “in-between” cinematic moments and landscapes from Second Life, and carefully stitching these together into architectural structures and sculptures, which demarcate their own relational spaces.

Patrick Lichty, born 1962, Akron, Ohio, has a M.FA. in Digital Art from Bowling Green University, a B.S in Electronic Engineering from the University of Akron, and is a Professor of Interactive Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago. Lichty is a technologically based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, animator for the activist group, The Yes Men, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. His work spans over 15 years, deals with media narrative/criticism and information aesthetics in many different contexts. He works in diverse technological media, including painting, printmaking, kinetics, video, generative music, and neon. Lichty has shown his solo and collaborative works at Tate London, Smithsonian American Art Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Center, as well as the Whitney, Torino, and Venice Biennales. He is currently in post-production on the upcoming Yes Men II movie, and has video works in the new Video Data Bank anthology released by Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Border Classicos. He resides in Chicago and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Second Front is the pioneering performance art group in the online avatar-based VR world, Second Life. Founded in 2006, Second Front quickly grew to its current eight-member troupe that includes Jeremy Owen Turner (Vancouver), Doug Jarvis (Victoria), Tanya Skuce (Vancouver), Gazira Babeli (Italy), Penny Leong Browne (Vancouver), Patrick Lichty (Chicago), Liz Solo (St. Johns) and Scott Kildall (San Francisco). Taking their influences from numerous sources -- including Dada, Fluxus, Futurist Syntesi, the Situationist International and contemporary performance artists like Laurie Anderson and Guillermo Gomez-Pena -- Second Front creates theatres of the absurd that challenge notions of virtual embodiment, online performance and the formation of virtual narrative. Created in 2006, they have already performed extensively, including in Vancouver, Chicago, New York. They have also been featured in such publications as Slate, Eikon, Realtime Arts (Australia), Toronto Globe & Mail, Avastar (published by Axel-Springer, Germany) and most recently in Exibart (Italy).