Time is always present in our interaction with works of art, whether we sit to contemplate a painting, stroll past a sculpture, or watch a video piece for its entire duration or cycle. Some works of art are time-based in that the viewer must experience them through the passage of time, as with music, while others refer to time through links or references to art history, our collective human history, or the timelessness of nature. Filmed on location in China; Japan; New York, New York; San Antonio, Texas; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Los Angeles, California.
\nCharles Atlas is a filmmaker and video artist who has created numerous works for stage, screen, museum, and television. Atlas is a pioneer in the development of media-dance, a genre in which original performance work is created directly for the camera. Many of Atlas\u2019s works have been collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and performers, including Yvonne Rainer, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramovic, Diamanda Galas, John Kelly, and Leigh Bowery. Atlas acted as Consulting Director for \u201cArt in the Twenty-First Century\u201d (Seasons 2 through 5), creating the original opening programs for each hour-long segment of Season 2, as well as supervising the \u201cStories,\u201d \u201cLoss and Desire,\u201d \u201cMemory,\u201d \u201cPlay,\u201d \u201cProtest,\u201d and \u201cParadox\u201d episodes.
\nMartin Puryear\u2019s objects and public installations\u2014in wood, stone, tar, wire, and various metals\u2014are a marriage of minimalist logic with traditional ways of making. Puryear\u2019s evocative, dreamlike explorations in abstract forms retain vestigial elements of utility from everyday objects found in the world. In the massive stone piece, Untitled, Puryear enlisted a local stonemason to help him construct a building-like structure on a ranch in northern California. On one side of the work is an eighteen-foot-high wall\u2014on the other side, an inexplicable stone bulge. A favorite form that occurs in Puryear\u2019s work, the thick-looking stone bulge is surprisingly hollow, coloring the otherwise sturdy shape with qualities of uncertainty, emptiness, and loss.
\nPaul Pfeiffer\u2019s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness. In a series of video works focused on professional sports\u2014including basketball, boxing, and hockey\u2014Pfeiffer digitally removes the bodies of the players from the games, shifting the viewer\u2019s focus to the spectators, sports equipment, or trophies won. Presented on small LCD screens and often looped, these intimate and idealized video works are meditations on faith, desire, and a contemporary culture obsessed with celebrity. Many of Pfeiffer\u2019s works invite viewers to exercise their imaginations or project their own fears and obsessions onto the art object.
\nTim Hawkinson is renowned for creating complex sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means. His installation, \u00dcberorgan\u2014a stadium-size, fully automated bagpipe\u2014was pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. The source of inspiration for many of Hawkinson\u2019s pieces has been the re-imagining of his own body, and what it means to make a self-portrait of this new or fictionalized body. In 1997, the artist created an exacting, two-inch-tall skeleton of a bird from his own fingernail parings; believable even at a close distance, this work reveals Hawkinson\u2019s attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and the passage of time.
\nVija Celmins received international attention early on for her renditions of natural scenes\u2014often copied from photographs that lack a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of field. Armed with a nuanced palette of blacks and grays, Celmins renders these limitless spaces\u2014seascapes, night skies, and the barren desert floor\u2014with an uncanny accuracy, working for months on a single image. Celmins has a highly attuned sense for organic detail and the elegance of imperfection. A master of several mediums, including oil painting, charcoal, and multiple printmaking processes, Celmins matches a tangible sense of space with sensuous detail in each work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Art 21 presents contemporary artists and offers you a more intimate view of their creative process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":124746,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"program_type":[15],"group":[542,546],"d_category":[665],"genre":[2492],"class_list":["post-124745","program","type-program","status-inactive","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","program_type-episode","group-creation","group-portraits","d_category-art-pop","genre-entertainement"],"yoast_head":"\n