New York’s non-profit NO. Gallery will from tonight house a tunnel structure comprised of 77 LED screens and other abstract multimedia compositions for Pia Myrvold’s dazzling and immersive exhibition, FLOW. Exploring 3D media in many of its luminous forms, FLOW offers an unforgiving, retina-burning interdisciplinary experience. Myrvold took Wonderland through her complex new project.
What can we expect to see at FLOW?
I present versions of the large installation “FLOW- Video Wall”, that was a four screen projection video with animated shapes or “sculptures”, edited in a software that enables me to make a kind of choreography on site, with ten sequences showing different environments. I premiered this work with some immersive video installations in an independent production parallel to the Venice Biennale. The work relates both to painting and sculpture in modernist tradition, while researching animation tools in 3D, gives new parameters to the idea of these traditional media. In addition to a large screen projection, I show smaller mono-channel editions, as well as ten large scale prints in the exhibition, that explores the visual themes in FLOW.
What major themes does it explore? Does it examine the mergence of analogue and digital technologies in the latter part of the last century?
Each 3D form in FLOW, (there are 11 animated forms) play into virtual landscapes of changing hues, debt and textures. The images are moving paintings or moving sculptures, a new era for these old media. I am mostly interested in the tools and the emerging context that animation tools allow us to experience. Art and language are connected, versions of signature that signifies concepts of reality, with systems like the alphabet, allowing us to code and de-code. My work in 3D explores information as a non-linear form of writing and demands new ways of reading, understanding and transmitting concepts.
What’s your background in exploring these themes?
In the 80s I launched into an interdisciplinary art understanding, connecting art to various elements in the matrix, like urban planning, socialand cultural responsible developments, architecture, design, and performance. As one of the few artist in this genre at the time, I introduced fashion as such a surface with www.cybercouture.com, that connected the limits of interdisciplinary knowledge with a practical
implication. In early 90s, I envisioned internet and computers as the perfect tool for this philosophy. Contrary to the established institutions of learning and teaching, as the emergence of the personal computer and access to internet revolutionised the flow of information, the new platform could synthesize all media at once.
Why did you choose to work with NO, itself a non profit organisation?
The curator and owner Sol Kjøk invited me and I was happy to make a trip to New York, where I have lived and visited extensively on and off during my career. The last three-to-four years I have been working with an international focus to establish networks as well as opportunities for some of my large scale installations, and see that many commercial galleries are afraid – due to their fragile economic circumstances – to take risks with new work and new artist. So the non-profit makes sense today, as these people are not in it for the money, but for the art.
Name your favourite three up-and-coming artists.
I hate the term “up-and-coming artist”, there is a kind of hype now that young is the same as good. In Paris I just met Miguel Chevalier, who does really great new media art – interactive digital mega flowers that follow the audience’s movements. I really liked the stylised video installation of the Russian art group AES+F in Venice 2009, that I found smartly humourous, accurately mirroring the zeitgeist of new global consumerism. I also think the performance piece by Jan Fabre “The Orgy of Tolerance”, is one of the most ludicrously brilliant artworks of the decade.
FLOW runs until March 3rd at NO. Gallery – 251 East Houston Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan.
Words: Jack Mills