"Evan Roth//Intellectual Property Donor" February 5 - March 2, 2014 in Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
Evan Roth//Intellectual Property Donor
Wednesday, February 5 — Sunday, March 2, 2014
First major U.S. exhibition by Paris-based American artist blurs boundaries between personal and public, artist and hacker
Middletown, Conn.—Evan Roth//Intellectual Property Donor, the first major U.S. one-person presentation of the artist's pioneering, multi-faceted and interactive installations, custom software, prints, sculptures and websites, organized by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2 curatorsquared, will be on view in Wesleyan University’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, located at 283 Washington Terrace on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown, Connecticut from Wednesday, February 5 through Sunday, March 2, 2014. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm. Gallery admission is free.
The public is invited to attend the opening reception on Wednesday, February 5, 2014 from 5:30pm to 7pm in the South Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. The reception will be preceded by an opening artist talk by Evan Roth at 4:30pm in CFA Hall, located at 287 Washington Terrace on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown. The artist talk and opening reception are both free.
Evan Roth's art is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York); has been exhibited widely in the Americas, Europe and Asia, including the Centre Pompidou and Fondation Cartier (Paris), the Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), and the Tate (London); and has occupied the front page of YouTube. He has received numerous awards, including the Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum commissions, the Future Everything Award, the inaugural Transmediale Open Web Award, the Design Museum London's Designs of the Year, and the prestigious Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.
At Wesleyan University, the exhibition is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History. Following Wesleyan, "Evan Roth//Intellectual Property Donor" will be on display at the Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University; and the Foosaner Art Museum, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida.
About the Exhibition
Evan Roth's work occupies the irregular zone at the intersection of free culture with popular culture, where viral media meets art, and graffiti connects with technology. The work is defined less by medium and genre than by its appropriation of popular culture. Mr. Roth's work is informed by the misuse of seemingly rigid structures, and the effect that philosophies from hacker communities can have when applied to non-digital systems. The powerful and surprising images, objects and experiences this exhibition presents introduce a new way to exist within the current environment that is shaped by our participation in an increasingly cyber and global world, yet grounded in our need for materiality and personal connections.
Mr. Roth consistently intervenes into existing systems to subvert or transform them from the private realm to the public. His interest with graffiti and open source programming fall under the rubric of hacking. He often mentions a “handshake” moment between graffiti writers and hackers, noting the inherent potential to reach wider audiences and spread into general popular culture by referencing the same systems and open source methodologies. He cites as his major influences free culture, issues surrounding copyright and online popular culture. Mr. Roth inventively takes his artist’s brain and reaches into the disparate worlds of computer programming and street culture, forging a new way to approach each realm through highlighting the sometimes-confounding issues that define urban culture. This exhibition will highlight these connections, making them real for visitors.
Ultimately, Evan Roth’s work is about intervening in a small but impactful way; whether a graffiti artist adds a tag to an existing public arena, or a hacker finds a loophole in a website that alters the performance of the site, or an artist initiates a dialogue with the public that suggests tweaking established systems or encouraging us to revisit the status quo. In inviting visitors to experience this first-hand, Mr. Roth is further reinforcing the viral component of his work. "Evan Roth//Intellectual Property Donor" offers a unique opportunity to understand the artist’s approach from analysis and archiving to experimentation through to the final—and in the artist’s mind—most important step, opening it up to the world for participation.
The "Evan Roth//Intellectual Property Donor" exhibition will feature recent works from 2009 to 2014, including the following:
• "Graffiti Analysis," a projection of custom software and an algorithmically produced sculpture that visualizes motion tracked graffiti data.
• "Ideas Worth Spreading," an interactive installation that invites visitors to create their own pirate TED talks.
• "A Tribute To Heather," ten web-based visual motion studies using found animated gif files that are viewed on gallery visitors' own computing devices (smartphones, tablets or laptops).
• "Intellectual Property Donor," a sticker available for each gallery visitor to adhere to their drivers license, in order to make a donation of their intellectual property to the public domain in the event of their death, to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
• "Propulsion Painting," a variety of mixed-media sculptures that perform tasks as a result of the pressure from spray paint.
• "Internet Cache Portraits," three printed portraits consisting of all the images viewed on the internet by an individual during the course of a day, or week, or month.
• “Internet Cache Silhouettes,” two fresh takes on the traditions of portraiture and silhouette-cutting where the sitter is defined by her online interactions rather than facial features.
• "Slide To Unlock," a wall-scaled print created by performing an everyday routine task on a multi-touch hand-held computing devices.
• "Level Cleared," a series of 1,700 smartphone screen–sized ink prints of the gestures required to beat the 300 levels of the popular game "Angry Birds."
About Evan Roth
Evan Roth is an American artist based in Paris whose work explores the relationship between misuse and empowerment. His notable pieces include "Graffiti Taxonomy," "Multi Touch," "EyeWriter," "Internet Cache Portraits," and a collaboration with Jay-Z on the first open source rap video. In an exploration of search engine optimization, he has also become the number one Google search result for “bad ass mother fucker.”
Born in 1978 in Okemos, Michigan, Evan Roth earned a degree in Architecture from the University of Maryland, and an M.F.A. from the Design and Technology department at Parsons The New School for Design, where he graduated as class valedictorian. Mr. Roth worked at the Eyebeam OpenLab, an open source creative technology lab for the public domain as a Research and Development Fellow from 2005 to 2006, and was a Senior Fellow there from 2006 to 2007. Evan Roth co-founded the Graffiti Research Lab in 2005 and the Free Art and Technology Lab (FAT Lab), an arts and free culture collective, in 2007.
Mr. Roth currently lives in Paris with his wife and daughter where he maintains a studio and is represented by XPO Gallery. His work can be found online at evan-roth.com.
About c2 - curatorsquared
c2 curatorsquared, a curatorial partnership formed in 2008 between Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, develops exhibitions of international, cross-media contemporary art and design that explore current cultural issues. The two met in 2001, while Ginger Duggan was the curator at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, and they coordinated the presentation of two exhibitions that Judy Fox had organized while curator at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Their collaboration began to take form when Duggan moved on to be the curator at the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, where they worked together on the conception of the exhibition "OVER + OVER" that ultimately opened at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois and toured nationally. Ms. Fox came to Boston after graduate school to be curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art. She was curator at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College for nineteen years and has held visiting curator posts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Harvard Art Museums and Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois. Ms. Duggan previously held curatorial posts at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington State and is currently based in Orlando, Florida. Together they have organized exhibitions for museums across the U.S. and abroad.
"FOOD-WATER-LIFE---LUCY+JORGE ORTA," an exhibition of sculptures, drawings, mixed-media installations and video that explored crucial themes of the contemporary world—biodiversity, environmental conditions, climate change and exchange among peoples—was organized by c2 curatorsquared for Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Massachusetts, and was on view in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from January 25 through March 3, 2013. In 2012, c2 curatorsquared organized the exhibition "Passing Time," an exhibition of recent works by fourteen international artists in a range of media which explored the multiple and converging meanings of the phrase “passing time." "Passing Time" was on view in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from January 27 through March 4, 2012 and has since traveled to three other museums. In 2010, c2 curatorsquared organized the exhibition "Connectivity Lost" which addressed the ways we are estranged from each other and from the environment in which we live. "Connectivity Lost" was on view in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from September 11 through December 6, 2010.
For more information about c2 curatorsquared, please visit http://www.curatorsquared.com.