Opening reception: Friday, July 29 from 6 – 8pm

Closing reception: Friday, August 26, from 6 to 9

Gallery hours: Tuesdays 12 – 5pm; Thursdays 5 – 9pm
July 29 – August 26, 2011

Press Release:
Figure One exhibition space will be holding an opening for its newest exhibit “Accepted Knowing: Peer Review” this Friday, July 29th, from 6pm to 8 pm.  The show, curated by a painter, a sculptor, and a librarian, features an array of work, including landscape painting, essays, Internet-based pieces and found object installations by a range of local and regional contributors.

This is an exhibition about the nature of knowledge: what do we know, how do we come to know, and what are the limits of knowing?

In scholarly research, what is accepted as “known” must be validated by professionals in that field. This system is formalized in the peer review process, where articles submitted to scholarly journals are accepted or rejected based on the recommendation of a panel of reviewers.

This exhibition engages with the peer review process through both its content and its structure. The jury process for this exhibition mimicked these collective validations of knowledge by allowing applicants to serve as a pool of experts who then collaboratively determined which work would be included in the show through anonymous written reviews.

The project resulted in a collection of works that question the veracity of information, the validity of objectivity, forms of knowledge transmission and memory, and the credibility of these experiences.

Peer reviews and wikis may reveal where these individualized understandings of information overlap (or are similarly socially constructed). They may lead to a clearer perspective of what is widely accepted to be true. Conversely, the divergences in knowledge may become more apparent through these practices. The jury process for this exhibition mimicked these collective validations of knowledge by allowing applicants to serve as a pool of experts who then collaboratively determined which work would be included through anonymous written reviews. Displaying the review statements alongside the works lends transparency to the overall process and provides insight into the ways that knowledge is constructed. This show at once values and critiques this process, leaving the viewer to wonder what it is, exactly, to know.

Jeanie Austin, Maria Lux, and Nicki Werner

Thank you again to everyone who who submitted work, and in particular for the excellent reviews that each participant submitted. Through this unique jurying process, a great deal of interesting critical discussion was generated and, whether selected for inclusion or not, each person’s work was given careful attention by their peers.

Over the next few weeks, the blog will be changing in order to reflect the work that is included in the exhibition, some of the commentary derived from the peer-review process, and updates to proposals, performances, and installations.

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Details: All submissions are archival inkjet prints, 20″x28″ (could be 30″x40″ if space allows). Image 1 from 2010 and the others are from 2011.

Statement:
Looking has become the primary way that we know and experience our natural heritage. We can never really know a pristine natural environment because the act of allowing access necessarily disturbs the untouched state of the area. The compromise is designated viewpoints and heavily controlled and mediated experiences within a few hundred feet of a parking lot easily accessible by a paved road. Does this compromise disrupt the experience or make it possible?

Peer Reviews

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Arnold’s work fits well within the themes of the show as he is addressing the way in which we receive and process information. While focusing on personal knowledge, Arnold also highlights the mediation of our reception of particular information by photographing designated “scenic” spots along the highway.

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Commenting on the controlled way we experience our natural and untouched environments makes sense. Because of the limitations put on state and national parks, our relationships and connections to them are artificially minimized or altered. This will inevitably effect our perceptions, memories and understanding of them and nature. Arnold is covering relevant and interesting ideas that are solidly expressed through these impressive and valid photographs.

Spaces that conflate the illusory and the actual are of great interest to me. A motel room, a child’s fort, a movie screen and a painting all exist as parts of the physical world, yet receive and are characterized by our projected desires and psychic understandings. Such spaces could also serve as metaphors for the bulk of individual and cultural knowledge we carry around daily. A constant negotiation—between subject and object, ideal and real—shapes the middle ground we regard as “truth.”

Peer Reviews

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The idea of fantasy and dream spaces like forts, tents and pools as a representation of a certain kind of ideal is interesting. While these spaces seem compromised (somehow deflated?) in Flood’s representation, their shortcomings lend a kind of charm to the concept that a more refined vision may destroy. The nature of whimsy is so incongruent with the concepts of truth or objective fact that I can’t help feel the piece’s general presence would lend a counterpoint to more considered or serious work seeking to locate specific contradictions regarding knowledge. Formally, I appreciate this artist’s use of texture, her dynamic structures and range of mediums. I think the pure invention of this work will challenge the concept of knowing, offering raw experience as an evocative alternative.

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Flood uses space both physically and metaphorically to address the ways that we disseminate and compartmentalize knowledge. Her work is reminiscent of painting, but her use of ephemeral materials question the formal qualities associated with traditional painting. Her work seems heavily involved in current popular discourses surrounding things, objects, and how they mediate our everyday lives. This work validates a specific way of compartmentalizing information by addressing the act of knowing/experience through the spaces we inhabit. This piece engages with current post-modern discourses surrounding the anti-aesthetic.

Entry 1: Spacial Perception 2011, 26"x24", Acrylic paint on silk

Entry 2: Upper Story 2011, 22"x14", Acrylic paint on silk

Statement:
Space is often thought about in terms of measurement. We condense, simplify  and create symbols to stand in for space and distance, such as a map or a floor plan, because it then becomes objective. What interests me about a given space is not the objective information but rather my own subjective perception of the environment. I experience various emotions and physical reactions based upon the type of space I am in and how my body is able to interact with it. These paintings do depict a specific place but they are more a record of my perception of a place. This perception came through viewing the space in a reflective surface which distorted the image and provided an exciting, somewhat surreal experience.

Peer Reviews

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If knowing is seeing, Gilles’ work makes the viewer re-evaluate the space occupied. Making one look at something one is familiar with in a new light. Her desire to give the viewer a glimpse of her subjective viewpoint ties well into the theme of how we all see things, and therefore how we all come to know things. By depicting space through a reflection one can certainly agree that her perspective is unique, and each person viewing a space will not see it in the same way.

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I think these pieces are beautiful. The artist is clear about the representative spaces she is discussing in a very visually poetic way. The artist is creating a space as seen through a reflection and then poetically preserving this experience in a painting.

Empty Islands (Detail)

Statement:
The visual components for this painting derive from two separate events. The first event includes a gathering of former classmates and one individual who half-heartedly attempts to burn down an island. The second event would follow a similar gathering, only this time taking place between a different group of individuals that I would meet for the first time years after hearing their story second hand. In a show about knowing, it makes sense to discuss our inability to share in another’s experience, without making that experience part of one we all ready know.

www.jimgrahamart.com

Peer Reviews

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The work seems to approach the intersection of worlds that take place in the collective experience when communicating and sharing information. The worlds tend to melt together and cannot remain distinct from one another. Communication of knowledge seems to be presented – in a way – as an action of burning down and melding individual islands of being enough to where what one knows is apart of everything else. This piece gives the observer a visual question. What remains of the original island?

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The depiction of “Empty Islands” is visually striking and speaks through dimensions and color. The work clearly illuminates the description given and engages the viewer to look deep into the visually vocal aspects of the work.

(above link has embedded video demonstration of the work)

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Personal Depersonalization System

Benjamin Grosser
2011
computer, display, and custom software

Every phrase you search, every link you click, and every path you
follow is databased, profiled, and indexed so that Google and other
data tracking companies can develop a refined portrait of who they
think you are—or more importantly, what they think you’ll buy. As a
result, there is no longer a standard Google; the Google you see is
personalized just for you and is different from the one anyone else
sees. My reaction to this is an automated query machine that
depersonalizes my own profile by hiding my real interests and
inclinations within a sea of random noise.

Peer Reviews

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The artist tries running away from Google, the most powerful information collector. He might be one of the pioneers who believes that hiding information has a potential power in the contemporary world which believes that ‘information is valuable.’ He is not even only hiding himself. By creating a lot of noisy information, he fights back against google. I believe he needs super hero costume, or Albert Camus’s long coat, because there is beauty in his work in the irrationality of his behavior. By creating more information about him, the artist believes that he has sort of power to exercise control toward the world. Sad and beautiful project.

2
This piece certainly addresses the veracity of information as well as the process by which we receive it. It seems to suggest that knowledge is being mediated by technology in such a way that makes each individual’s experience unique and separate from the larger realm of collected knowledge. For me, this raises questions such as “what does it mean for technology to assemble an identity for an individual?” and “how does this constructed identity affect a person’s experience of the presented information?”

Drawing installation Computer tablet drawing, digital print, Diverse dimension (detail images follow)

Additional information and images

http://www.yunjeonghong.com/guppy-breading.php

Through ‘Guppy Breeding: Being Orchid’, fish becomes plant. By orchid shapes result from a breeder’s fantasy, the evolution of guppy’s bearing resemblance to orchids presents a new perspective on perception. This project is a document of this passionate, enthusiastic and desirable-fake-Guppy breeding.

Peer Reviews

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Guppy Breeding: Being Orchid’s works do an interesting job of cataloging biological diversity in a way that feels like a field report. We know these things to be false, but the taxonomy and documentation submerses us in a study where these creatures exist. One part field journal, one part schematic, the work fits the theme of the show by cataloging what we think we expect and, leaving us pleasantly surprised with its care of documentation of morphology.

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Making drawings of objects or animals in order to attempt to have a better understanding is an old method of learning what it is that we know. There is a high amount of skill required for such scientific illustration to stand up to the standards of its field. When these illustrations are used in a textbook, they become the first introduction to that subject for many people, so the accuracy is important. These drawings move from a traditional study of fish and flowers into a make believe hybrid of the two, using the familiar scientific jargon and imagery of observation.

Entry 2 :Episteme (2009)

Wood, glue, nail gun, book, found objects 78x38x67 inch

Additional information and images

http://www.yunjeonghong.com/episteme.php

To narrow gap between reality and fiction through object, staircase was an interesting architectural object. It is located in-between object and space, not likely wall, which is invisible screen functions to create space, and extending time and body movement.

Peer Review

Taking from Foucalt’s idea that opposing theories can co exist, Episteme takes our preconceptions of direction and structures, and visually plays with them. An organic stairwell creeping and growing, and precariously supported by itself, creating something that is both alive and moving in an independent space, making us question our ideas about space and moving in it. I think it successfully addresses the themes of preconceptions and expectations. The technical execution and craft, as well as idea for placement also visually reinforce the ideas of not just a stairwell, but creeping and growing structure, and also origin and destination, as well as mechanical/architectural structure and organic growing thing.