Exhibitions Archive-UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts

Douglas Repetto, action at a distance (detail), 2008

Shadi Nazarian and Douglas Repetto
February 28 through May 17, 2008

Tangential Reform
February 28 through March 22, 2008

Opening receptions
Thursday, February 28, 2008
5 to 7 pm
Douglas Repetto artist talk at 5:00 pm in First Floor Gallery
Shadi Nazarian artist talk at 5:30 pm in Lightwell

Shadi Nazarian, Introversions construction drawing in plan: Jon Spielman of factoryny, 2008

Introversions, a Lightwell Project by Shadi Nazarian: 2/28/08 – 5/17/08.
Nazarian frames and choreographs an architectural experience as audiences are drawn toward a responsive minimalist structure, seemingly hovering in midair. Working in the fertile intersections of art, architecture, and emergent technology, she employs switchable Liquid crystal layered privacy glass to explore cognition and think about the ways in which we navigate the environment we live in. In the commercial sector, privacy glass has been used primarily for partitions, display cases, bank screens, and as enclosures for conference rooms, and provocatively, in dressing rooms and bathrooms. Presented in an academic and artistic context, Introversions seeks to discover how new materials such as privacy glass fundamentally alter spatial relationships and human perception. Nazarian isolates and enhances disorienting moments inherent to urban conditions that are triggered by reflections and other strange sights seen out of the corner of the eye by combining minimalist sculpture and architecture to generate uncanny optical effects.

Nazarian moved to New York City in 1989 to join I.M. Pei & Partners as an architectural designer, and then to Ithaca, NY to teach at Cornell University (1991-92, and 1999-2002). She has been teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning since 1994.

The production of Introversions is sponsored in part, by a generous grant from the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artists Program (Film, Media and New Technology Production Category), New York Foundation for the Arts Special Opportunity Stipends, as well as the support of CBO Glass, KNEMA LLC, Polytronix Inc. and SMG HARSON. Fabrication by factoryny.

Douglas Repetto: 2/28/08 – 5/17/08.
Douglas Repetto’s two installations in the first floor gallery revel in madcap interactivity and DIY technologies. action at a distance is a bewitching tangle of motors and pulleys, zigzags of rope, an otter theater, jangling bells, fireflies, switches, breath activators, and rough steel. Small gestures made by visitors are amplified and transmitted via motors and rope, repurposed as the drivers of small dramas tucked into corners and nooks. everything, all at once is a sudden condensation of sound and reflections: a dense net of hundreds of bells, mirrors, motors, lights, and vibrations envelop the viewer. These immersive performance and listening experiences attest to how the visual arts are being revolutionized by new technologies such as sensors and interactive performance systems.

Repetto is an artist and teacher whose varied interests exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art production today. His work, which includes sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software, is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Repetto is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and lives in New York City.