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AAI LTSP Artist Recipient Studio #315
Paul
Clay
multiple media
REASON
TAKES A NEOLIBRALIST HOLIDAY, OR COMPRESSION ARTIFACTS EN LA PLAYA.
2000. Manipulated found JPEG, recompressed 3000 times.
Bio:
Paul Clay is a visual artist and curator who works in a wide variety
of media. His perspective comes from an early interest in anthropology
and social change. Recent projects include "You are Here" at the Diesel
Denim Gallery in Soho; the video artwork "future.surface.(Text)ure"
for Art in General - at the 2003 Armory Show; the live video work
"Dis-Play", presented at the 10 year anniversary of the Kunsthalle
Wien in Vienna in November 2002, and at Austrian art institution Magazin
4, in July 2002; Curation of "winter.chill" involving live audio and
video artists at New York's apexart for "sans an exhibition", December
2002; Curation of seven video artists in the "Brewster Project 2002";
"Fictive Net Porn" a project involving over 70 contemporary artists,
writers, and theorists from around the world creating web based artworks
about the issue of pornography on the net, launched at the point art
galley in New York in November of 2001, (on line permanently at www.fictive.net/porn);
"Fictive Advertising" a two page culture-hack subvertisement in NY
ARTS magazine, October 2001. He did set and live video design for
David Dorfman's "To Lie Tenderly" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
(BAM) in December, 2000. He designed the set for the Pulitzer prize
winning Broadway Musical Rent, 1997. He received a "Municipal Arts
Society Times Square Spectacular" Award from Tibor Kalman for his
redesign of the marquee and exterior of the Nederlander theater. He
has worked with performance creators including Mabou Mines, and Beth
B. at PS122 in New York and Steve Shill at the ICA in London. He received
a Bessie award in 91, and an NEA/TCG Fellows grant for 93/94. He served
as visual advisor on Tom Noonan's feature film "What Happened Was...",
(94 Grand Jury Prize, Sundance and Silver Hugo Award, Chicago International
Film Festival.) He shows photography, new media, and fashion related
art work in the underground night scene, alternative gallery spaces,
and on line. He is the founder of Fictive (www.fictive.net), and is
chair of the Artists Alliance Inc. - a collective of 65 artists based
in New York's Lower East Side. He is also Gallery Director for CUCHIFRITOS
- AAI's not for profit art gallery/project space - located inside
New York City's Essex Street Food Market.
Artist Statement:
My parents are academics and I lived for a time in Ghana, Africa;
Venezuela, and Malaysia, as well as a number of communities in the U.S.
This led me to an interest in cultural anthropology which I studied
in college. I've often taken issues of cultural understanding as a launching
point in creating work. Much of it involves low technology, simple basic
materials, as well as light and shadow. In tandem with this I've pursued
an exploration of how high tech materials and mediums can be used to
express basic visual and cultural issues. The fashion art work is made
from a wide variety of everyday materials and products. Everything from
plastic table cloths, to bed spreads, to children's jump ropes have
been used to create actual wearable clothing. The idea is to explore
the grace inherent in these materials through the medium of fashion,
and to put forward a new set of notions about beauty by juxtaposing
the origins of the materials with qualities in the finished forms. The
Digital art work includes stripped back, minimalist virtual worlds,
focusing on fundamental aspects of Western visual representation and
digital technology and can played almost like video games, but may also
be viewed as a sort of critique of Western visualization. The live video
art involves a kind of real time mining of visual data out of a host
of simultaneous inputs including live video cameras, prerecorded tape
and computers. It combines the collaborative and improvisatory aspects
of performative work with a focus on color and structure as higher level
elements of content. A kind of revaluing of visual meanings.