Not to say acrylics and oils are boring, but sometimes something a little different can go a long way. Instead of the typical canvases portraying anger with red paint or loneliness with blue, the use of new media in today's art world takes expression to a new level.
The Carnegie Art Center in Tonawanda is housing an art show of entirely new media entitled, "Now Again the Past: Rewind, Replay, Resound." The show opened this weekend and runs through March 18.
Every artist in "Now Again the Past" experiments with video and numerous mixed media. The use of new media can be scary and weird at first and for someone who prefers landscapes or neutral colors, this art may come as a shock.
Carolyn Tennant, a media study graduate student at UB, has a personal interest in media dealing with preservation.
"The beauty of preservation art is the ability to breathe new life into projects that may have been 'of the moment' in the past," Tennant said. "Reenactment is a current theme among preservationists."
Felix Gmelin and Amie Siegel are two artists who experimented with films from the past. "ColorTest, the Red Flag No. 2," by Gmelin, incorporated two silent films running side-by-side of people running through the streets of Berlin and Stockholm passing a red flag back and forth.
The original was filmed in 1968 and the remake was done in 2002 on the same streets in the exact places. Actors were used to duplicate the effect, but there are many cultural differences between the two videos. The question Gmelin asks his audience is, "What happened culturally and politically in that almost 40-year time span?"
Amie Siegel also used the dual projector technique showing original scenes from films shot in East Berlin in her piece, "Berlin Remake."
"The shots are re-created and framed exactly as their original set up, only populated now by contemporary architecture and historical absence (of) Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, and Gendarmenmarket," Seigel said.
Other pieces, like Kota Ezawa's "Lennon Sontag Beuys," incorporated animation. Ezawa applied a classic cartoon style to reshape a documentary of the 1969 Amsterdam bed-in for Peace with John Lennon and Yoko Ono footage.
Johnson, Carter and Reagan's inaugural and farewell speeches are shown on six different televisions in Zach Poff 's "Parallel Rhetoric: Coming and Going." The piece subtly criticizes reliance on presidential speechwriters.
With the collaboration of video and 35mm film, Bruce Checefsky highlights the photogram technique in "Apteka (Pharmacy)."
"This is not a reconstruction of the original but an interpretation based on surviving documents, film stills and notes," Checefsky said.
The use of 35mm film and video has not only inspired an artist in the show, but also an outside observer.
"I approach this type of art very openly because I'm just trying to grasp something," said Andrew Katland, a musical artist. "However, I was struck by the 35mm film for my own piece. This show has been a great inspiration and has given me great research ideas."
The Carnegie Arts Center is located in North Tonawanda. See www.carnegieartscenter.org for more details.
