There are times when the great outdoors shrinks phenomenologically to the scale of a prison, and times when the indoors expands to the scale of the universe.
–Robert Smithson. "The Spiral Jetty"
On Saturday, December 13th, the gallery will open with a group exhibition of slide, film, and video projections. Places that are Elsewhere concentrates the viewer's attention on individual projection works that expand the physical space of the gallery and fill it with images of a distant and vastly shrunken image of the world outside. The exhibition is centered around a slide projection from 1979 by Peter Campus and the 1971 film Swamp by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt (shown as a video in this exhibition). These artists have exerted a profound influence over succeeding generations and thus, the exhibition will bring together these works, as well as pieces by younger artists.
Shot on the frozen surface of Lake Erie, Katy Schimert's 16mm film, The Astronaut is inspired by Smithson's crystalline structures. The site/non-site confluence of the gallery inside and the outside world can be found in both Jessica Bronson's closed-circuit video projection piece from 1997, titled Washed Under Whitely and T. Kelly Mason's slide installation, Theory of Sculpture. Sam Durant and Andrea Bower's 1996 videotape, Corn is based directly on Durant's memory of the Smithson/Holt film, which he and Bowers attempt to reconstruct in a corn field. Christopher Williams' video projection piece, Supplement '96 pays indirect homage to the slide and video work of Peter Campus.
This exhibition has been organized by the artist Diana Thater. This is Thater's second group exhibition for the gallery. Her first curated show, Sampler 2, included 26 artists from southern California and has traveled continuously since it was installed in the gallery in 1996. It is currently part of the Sunshine & Noir. Art in L.A. 1960-1997 traveling exhibition organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark, currently on view at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany through February 1, 1998.