Stephen Gang Gallery, Inc.
529 W. 20th St. 4E
New York, NY 10011
Tel. 212-741-7832 Fax 212-741-7957
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*
MARGOT LOVEJOY and MILES DUDGEON
STORM FROM PARADISE
video projection installation
March 4 - 25, 2000
reception: March 4, 6 - 8:00 p.m.
STORM FROM PARADISE is a collaborative video installation by Margot
Lovejoy and Miles Dudgeon. Projection through layers of screens, which
represent the layers of time, raise questions about the
political/social/scientific choices, philosophies and discoveries, made this
century. The transitory nature of progress and the media driven culture has
rendered both concepts and technologies obsolete. Changes during this
century have accelerated, making the newly acquired necessary and then
quickly discarded as a casualty of change, consumption, discovery or
invention. Constant change by consumption of ideas, inventions, products and
fashion, mainly for monetary profit, is the progress which is often the
debris we leave behind. The Twentieth Century can be noted for both its
extreme progress and destruction. Within the concept of these ruins, Margot
Lovejoy and Miles Dudgeon ask how we can repair and reconstruct. Based on a
concept by Walter Benjamin, their work addresses these issues of history, of
obsolescence and of the transitory landscape seen as time changes.
But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has caught in his wings with
such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while
the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call
progress. *
*Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," completed in
the spring of 1940, was first published in Neue Rundshau 61 in 1950, pp.
257-258. This transition was published in Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt,
1968, Schocken Books, NY.
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Note: The technology-art tradition was nurtured by the early Twentieth
Century Utopian vision of the Constructivists. Groups in the 1950s and
1960s, such as ZERO, in D�sseldorf, continued this vision. The irony inherent
in this exhibit is that the technology, which disenchantment with began in
the 1970s, is the means by which it is questioned. The context of our era
dictates the tools, which will be used to question, answer, repair and
reconstruct. In Western Cultures, media has rendered the historical human
tendency to resist change archaic. Change in technology is now embraced,
while simultaneously mistrusted. This contradiction is a question for
Sociologists, Psychologists and Cultural Anthropologists to answer and
explain.
For further information contact Stephen Gang.
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12:00 - 6:00
