Sundance Film Festival

Cluster in New Frontier at Sundance

January 18 - 28, 2007

“Schatz is documenting the present, showing snippets from the past and continuously turning both into video compositions. It‘s art in constant flux.”

-Robert L. Pincus, The San Diego Union-Tribune

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a third solo exhibition of Chicago-based artist Lincoln Schatz and his inclusion in the New Frontier program at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, featuring works in Schatz‘s generative multi-channel video installation series. Remarkable in vision and scale, these painterly compositions collapse time, depicting dynamic landscapes and portraits. Visualizing the memory of an environment, these works reconsider fixed notions of history, time and place. Each unique artwork records, stores and displays video that recounts its record of exhibition, building a distinct visible aura.

As art critic Robert L. Pincus describes, “Schatz may have created this work, but its imagery moves away from his control. It combines whatever transpires in front of the camera, which is then transformed by software. In a sense, the art becomes its own artist, creating as it goes.”

Cluster is the first of a new generation of Collision of Memory works composed in HD. Saturated videos ebb and flow across the screen. Organic geometries are cut out of time and layered on top of each other, creating a new time-based sculpture that is constantly in flux. Crisp and vibrant, Cluster creates a new reality in which all time is compressed. Cluster will be installed as part of the Sundance Film Festival‘s New Frontier section, which highlights “artists who are working at the intersection of art, film, and emerging media technologies.”

This past year Schatz has been commissioned to design several large-scale memory video works for permanent exhibition in public spaces. On exhibit at bitforms gallery are previews of two large video commissions, the One Arts Plaza video walls opening March 2007 in Dallas, and a 4-channel installation for Chicago‘s Helmut Jahn-designed 600 Fairbanks high-rise opening October 2007.

Featured in this exhibition is one of the two interactive video walls commissioned for the entrance of Dallas‘s One Arts Plaza, opening in the city‘s redesigned Arts District March 29, 2007. Consisting of two 9 x 9 feet video walls (each composed of six 40” x 60” screens), the piece is one of the largest interactive new media works to be permanently displayed in a public space. Continuously collected videos from the artwork‘s own environment are selectively displayed onscreen in four overlapping layers, merging past with present.

From the moment the One Arts Plaza building opens in Dallas, two cameras (one for each wall) begin recording and storing video that is culled daily from the lobby environment, up to 8 years. Each video wall displays a separate visual account of the same setting, and visualizes the relativity that can be experienced by two people witnessing an event simultaneously. As actions of people in the space are recorded, visual memories collected by the artwork are influenced by its public.

This exhibit will also feature one of the four 40ft. x 60ft. video screens to be permanently installed, in a 2 x 2 matrix, in the lobby of the Helmut Jahn-designed 600 Fairbanks high-rise in Chicago October 2007. Visualizing the flux of urban landscape in this multi-perspective video installation, Schatz follows the development of a building from its incursion into the ground to its emergence onto the Chicago skyscape. Acting as an observer and chronicler of history, the artwork will display approximately 20 months of video layers collected from three cameras mounted at various points on the tower crane and on the adjacent building, in addition to handheld footage captured weekly onsite by Schatz. The onscreen video imagery pulled from this 4-channel video memory database continuously recombines, and composes a time-based generative collage. As the building grows, so does the complexity of the piece.

Recent exhibitions of work by Lincoln Schatz (b. 1963, United States) include the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California; Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; bitforms Seoul, Korea; and the Pulse art fair in Miami, Florida. Recent permanent public art installations include the McCormick Place Convention Center (May 2007, Chicago), the Helmut Jahn-designed 600 Fairbanks high-rise (October 2007, Chicago), One Arts Plaza (March 2007, Dallas), and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies (Fall 2005, Chicago). Private commissions include I Am Here, created in Shanghai for contemporary art collector Pearl Lam. Lincoln Schatz received his BA from Bennington College in 1986 and was the recipient of a CORE fellowship to the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He is a co-founder of open-node, the Chicago chapter of The Upgrade! International.