
THE
INTERNATIONAL ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM
New Works: 99.1
George Cisneros, SAN ANTONIO, TX
Simryn Gill, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Carolee Schneemann, NEW PALTZ, NY
Exhibition: March 12, 1999 – April 18, 1999
Opening: Thursday, March 11, 1999, 6:30-8:30 PM
Artists’ Dialogue: Friday, March 12, 1999 at 6:30 PM
ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio
presents New Works: 99.1, a series of installations by the
current participants of our International Artist-in-Residence
Program. An opening celebration will take place on Thursday,
March 11, and the following evening, Eleanor Heartney, a
contributing editor for Art in America, will moderate an
artists’ dialogue.
Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill’s work inhabits the contested areas between nature
and culture. She shifts materials and objects between these
spheres, creating situations and forms which can be both funny
and deadly serious. In previous works, seeds are aided in their
dispersal by the addition of wheels, tropical leaves become
variegated with text, clothing is made from the bark of coconut
trees and shards of sea glass are etched with words.
During her residency at ArtPace, Gill continues her
destabilization of natural elements. The work is set in the arid
landscape of West Texas where she collected native plants. Over
the course of several weeks the intact plants were stripped and
reconstructed to mimic their organic sources in the form of
sculptural head coverings—a hood of spiky agave, a cowl of
yukka, a veil of tumbleweed. These objects were then
photographed while worn by people, both in the vicinity of
related plants in the stark desert and in the equally austere
space of her ArtPace studio. The resulting large-scale
black-and-white photographs, entitled Vegetation, are pinned to
the gallery walls at ArtPace. The pictures imply performance and
ritual as much as they recall early classificatory records in
the realms of anthropology and botany.
With Vegetation, Gill explores the cross-fertilization of the
language of horticultural, botanical and social terminology such
as naturalization, transplantation, mimicry, camouflage and
dissemination. Language is literally dressed to give equally
biting currency to plants as to people.
Born in 1959 in Singapore, Gill was raised in Malaysia and
currently lives in Sydney, Australia. She has shown widely in
Europe, Asia and Australia, including solo exhibitions at Kiasma,
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; ArtSpace,
Sydney, Australia; Substation Gallery, Singapore; Experimental
Art Foundation, Adelaide, Australia; and Rosalyn Oxley9 Gallery
in Sydney, Australia, where she is represented. She has
participated in a number of group shows and international
festivals, including Skin Trilogy at the Malaysian National Art
Gallery; TransCulture at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Italy; the
5th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; and the 1994 Adelaide Biennial,
Australia. Gill’s installation at ArtPace will travel to The
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia. This is Simryn
Gill’s first exhibition in the United States.
Gill was selected by: Elizabeth Armstrong, David Avalos, Dana
Friis-Hansen, Thelma Golden and Maaretta Jaukkuri.
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