The Montclair Art Museum presents "New Media: New Forms"

April 16, 2012 - PRLog -- The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) is pleased to present New Media: New Forms, a group exhibition of new media art by New Jersey-based artists opening Saturday, April 21. As the world becomes increasingly digitized, many contemporary artists are incorporating new technologies into their work. The 13 artists selected for this juried exhibition produce work that actively and innovatively engages with digital media, in terms of process, form, or content. The exhibition is this year’s New Jersey Arts Annual: Fine Arts and will be on view in the Marion Mann Roberts gallery and on the outdoor video monitors through July 22.

The featured works address digital technologies in myriad ways, incorporating “new media” such as video, sound, Internet technologies, digital photography, and digital printmaking, along with installation, sculpture, and drawing. In her sculpture Fingerprint Bureau, Valerie Huhn situates LED light works within an antique chest of drawers. JC Lenochan examines the intersection of pedagogy and identity in his sculpture Epistemology “Angelitos Negros” Take Two, a hybrid of found objects and video. Kara Rooney’s That Black Hole of Spoken Language We Call Speech emphasizes sound and light within an interactive sculptural work. In his Binary Portraits Series, Vincent Salvati reimagines renowned paintings using computer code. Peter Tilgner’s digital photographs, Abolition and Le Mole, present surreal Parisian street scenes. In Les Uns et Les Autres, a three-channel video installation, Liselot van der Heijden meditates upon last year’s Occupy Wall Street protests.

Many of the artists comment on popular culture, including movies, music, and video games. In his single-channel video Labyrinthine, Gregg Biermann reinterprets Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. Andrew Demirjian’s interactive video installation The Week in Review composes music as it charts fluctuations in music industry stock prices. Keith Kostelny utilizes antiquated video technologies in his critique of capitalist culture, Kill Yr Boss. Joan Pamboukes’s digital print Mint Sky reads as a monochrome abstraction, but was made by sampling color from the video game “Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas.” Matthew Allen Wilson’s meticulous drawings Perceptions of Success based on stills from movies and television, question Hollywood’s depictions of masculinity.

All the exhibited works have been created within the past three years and some were created specifically for New Media: New Forms. Efrat Kedem’s two-channel video installation Windows streams real-time feeds of the Montclair Art Museum’s grounds, as captured by closed-circuit surveillance cameras inside MAM’s windows. Joe Scanlan’s Los Nuevos Monumentos de Passaic (a riff on Robert Smithson’s 1967 Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey), combines various digital media with performance and sculpture: cycling on back roads from Harlem to the Montclair Art Museum, the artist shot digital images of sites along his journey, which is also represented by a sculpture in the shape of his Google Maps bike route. Together, the works in the exhibition demonstrate the many ways in which contemporary artists employ, manipulate, and transform digital technologies.  

The New Jersey Arts Annual is a unique series of Fine Arts and Crafts exhibitions highlighting the works of visual artists and craftspeople in the state. The Arts Annual series is cosponsored by the New Jersey Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment of the Arts; the Montclair Art Museum; the Morris Museum; the Newark Museum; the Noyes Museum of Art; and the New Jersey State Museum. The exhibition was open to artists currently living or working in New Jersey and who engage with digital media in their work, and was juried by Curator of Contemporary Art Alexandra Schwartz of the Montclair Art Museum and Kelly Baum, Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. New Media: New Forms is organized by Alexandra Schwartz with MAM Curatorial Assistant Kimberly Fisher.

Artists
The 13 artists whose works are included in this exhibition live or work in New Jersey:
Gregg Biermann– Hackensack, NJ
Andrew Demirjian– Palisades Park, NJ
Valerie Huhn– Brick, NJ
Efrat Kedem– Princeton, NJ
Keith Kostelny– Ewing, NJ
JC Lenochan– Orange, NJ
Joan Pamboukes– Astoria, NY and Instructor of photography and media arts at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
Kara Rooney– Jersey City, NJ
Vincent Salvati– Roselle Park, NJ
Joe Scanlan– New York, NY and Director, Professor of Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University
Peter Tilgner– Tenafly, NJ
Liselot van der Heijden– Jackson Heights, NY and Associate Professor in the department of Art & Art History at The College of New Jersey
Matthew Allen Wilson– Dunellen, NJ

Group Tours
Group tours may be booked by calling 973-259-5136 or by emailing tours@montclairartmuseum.org.

Online Press Site
The Museum will maintain a site dedicated to the exhibition for journalists seeking further information, including a checklist and images. Please visit http://www.montclairartmuseum.org/press/ and click on "For the Media."

Visit Montclair
For more Montclair experiences, visit websites for the Montclair Center Business Improvement District (http://www.montclaircenter.com/) and Destination Montclair (http://www.destinationmontclair.com/).

Sponsorship
Funding for New Media: New Forms: 2012 Fine Arts Annual has been provided by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

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The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) presents exhibitions and programs that reflect its collection of historic and contemporary American and Native American art. MAM's Yard School of Art offers classes for people of all ages.