curated by Juliana Cope

Works by Jen Liu, Mie Olise and G.I. Gurdjieff

Issue Project Room presents new works, Jen Liu’s THE END OF TIME- Messian and Gabo In the Blonde Period and Mie Olise’s A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, a double sided journey of the two Esben Arnakkes and Into the Pyramid, are presented in conjunction with a rare public performance of a composition by G. I. Gurdjieff.

Through deliberate historical and critical investigation the artists in this evening arrive at new fictions and works. Included are suspended moments which we may or may not choose to enter; strangeness embraced.

When wanderings on the smooth spaces become intolerable, survivors seek magic mountains; spaces that become mountains by rising suddenly; or villages that disappear down a dead-end branch. –Gurdjieff

The recognition of utopia being not a place, time, or exclusive experience, artists Liu and Olise aim grasp the complexities of art making and bring to life their own fictions in real time.

JEN LIU

Jen Liu presents THE END OF TIME – Messiaen and Gabo In the Blonde Period

“Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.” Hugh Hefner

Jen Liu’s drawings, videos, installations and performances pull together disparate historical and contemporary entities, to create new fictions and unexpected perspectives on the past. She has exhibited internationally, with recent exhibitions at Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Kunsthaus Zurich; and Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool; and was in residence at ISCP in 2008/2009; She is currently working towards a 2-person show at On Stellar Rays in the Lower East Side, which will open this fall.

http://www.upstreamgallery.nl/jen-liu/

In 1941, Messiaen premiered “Quartet for the End of Time” at Stalag VIII-A, a German POW camp. This piece envisioned the apocalypse as a liberation from time itself. Twenty years earlier, Naum Gabo’s “Realist Manifesto” articulated an aesthetic revolution, that would obliterate Cubism and Futurism, narrative and color, to make room for an aesthetic suited to the ashes and vacancy of WWI’s ruin – what would come to be known as Constructivism.

Here, in “The End of Time,” musicians play excerpts from the Quartet, reconfigured to create a trajectory of decline. A vintage recording of Gabo reading his Manifesto plays over the phone, auto-tuned to sing along with the Quartet: a digital sing-song about time and space. A couple “Blondes” join in, complicating and obstructing the flow of these historical manifests, raising questions about the nature of revolution, and providing the visual distraction that is the primary characteristic of the contemporary moment. Messiaen and Gabo cast a blonde shadow on the present, and together, they bring time to a smooth, silent halt.

MIE OLISE

Working as a painter, constructor and filmmaker Mie Olise has developed a particular blend of architecture, art, and psychology. She works with narratives relating to space, abandoned places and desolate structures. Olise travels to these places in different states of disrepair, to research, collect stories and later subjectively develop particular layers of the found truths. Mie Olise has exhibited at the Skive New Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Barbara Davis Gallery, Texas; Ystad Museum of Art, Sweden; Liverpool Bienalle, Liverpool and is an artist in residence at ISCP.

www.olise.dk

Mie Olise traveled recently to New Foundland to research for A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks, a double sided
journey of the two Esben Arnakkes.

 Here she presents Aksel and Esben are Brothers, Twins, the first of six works in the series. Through her travels Olise is trying to track down both the sailor, Esben
Arnakke – main-character of Aksel Sandemoses famous 
autobiographical novels (Esben Arnakke fled the same
island in Denmark where Olise grew up), as well as the ship, Esben Arnakke, built by
the artist’s father and lost in 1986.

In 2008 funded by the Danish Art Council Mie realized her 2nd trip to the North Pole to investigate a Russian abandoned ghost town, resulting in the work Into the Pyramid. Olise brought musician Goodiepal’s composition for the work. She played this on loudspeakers in
the Russian abandoned square in front of the Lenin Statue. Accompanying her were the birds and an armed guard to protect her from polar bears.

G. I. Gurdjieff (deceased 1949), known as a mystic and teacher, created a system including music, movements, and writing, studied by seekers of all kinds. His influence on contemporary artistic practice has recently begun to be investigated and publicized. Artists ranging from Meredith Monk to Peter Brook have studied his work. Music composed with Thomas de Hartmann and performed by musicians Mitzi DeWhitt, Chris Wertenbaker and Richard Finestone are included in this evening.

This event is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Fund. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported through mediaThe Foundation and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.