on view from November 13 - December 23, 2010

THE FRUSTRATION OF EXPRESSION
curated by Dorota Czerner in collaboration with iNDIE
featuring GARY HILL with newly commissioned works by MARILLA ABRAHAMSEN, WILL LYTLE, ANTHONY MORELLI, KAELA SMITH, & TAIMA SMITH

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
Curated by Dorota Czerner and featuring works by former participants in the iNDIE Media Program, The Frustration of Expression brings back to Woodstock one of the most renowned voices in contemporary video art and an artist who spent his formative artistic years in Woodstock, New York, home to one of the nation's longest running artist colonies.

The exhibition features Gary Hill's Wall Piece (2000) a complex multifaceted installation which features the artist hurtling himself against a wall, uttering a single word from a prepared monologue. With each impact a strobe flashes, both complicating and articulating the moment Hill simultaneously hits the wall and utters a word.

With Wall Piece as the exhibitions "center piece", the five selected alumni of the iNDIE Media Program working with Czerner and iNDIE Director Russell Richardson, have created newly commissioned pieces both in response to Hill's work and focused on addressing "the frustration of expression", particularly in connection to having grown up in Woodstock. Their video installations, created specifically for this exhibition, explore the terrain of adolescent expression and the obstacles - both external and internal - to that expression. The development of these pieces can be followed on VIMEO by clicking here, as Richardson accompanies his former students and uses his own camera to capture the complex process of artistic creation

CURATOR'S STATEMENT:
With the Aquarian paradise tangled before them in beaded necklaces, young people of Woodstock grow up knowingly listening through the gap between myth and reality.

The disjuncture between the town, and its own essential happening, generates nostalgia for the absent story.

"True life is absent. But we are in the world. All metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi" (Emmanual Levinas).

Teenage rebellion embodies rejection of the fake. Desire for a true life. Truly spoken - truly experienced. Every trajectory of acquiring an identity reveals both: a negation, and a yearning turned towards "the elsewhere, the otherwise, and the other".

Yet ingress into the metaphysical space is never easy.

There, at the threshold, lies trepidation.

There, is breaking the boundaries of social acceptability, pushing against the predictabilities of the physical world. Testing the veracity of words and spaces, of textural and textual objects. Walking the line of trust.

There, is violence comparable to breaking through one's own walls.

In flashes of flesh - flashes of light.

Breakthrough fragments of identity surface intimate worlds, expressed by the flow of images weaving themselves from the other side.

Like summer fireflies, their expressive energies illuminate the darkened field.

- Dorota Czerner, 2010


ABOUT iNDIE:
Established in 1999, iNDIE provides hands-on educational offerings which allows youth between 16 and 23 years of age to come together, work on media projects - chiefly video - and interact with mentors from the local community. CPW is pleased to have had a history of collaborating with the program since its inception including hosting special screenings and curated exhibitions. To learn more about iNDIE, visit www.indieprograms.org.

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