Press Release: Opener 11

Nina Katchadourian Featured Artist in New Tang Exhibition

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery will present Opener 11: Nina Katchadourian: All Forms of Attraction, from June 24 through Dec. 30. Part of the Tang Museum's ongoing series exhibiting new artists and artworks, All Forms of Attraction will present 15 years of work by Katchadourian, a Brooklyn-based artist becoming known for her wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and irreverent wit.

Organized by Tang Curator Ian Berry in collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will include 20 of Katchadourian's multilayered artworks, which incorporate elements of sculpture, photography, video, and performance art. The pieces spring from a wide array of starting point — from spiderwebs to space travel, from Morse code to the spoken word, from family heirlooms to archetypal examples of human endurance. “My interest lies in blurring the boundary between the natural and the unnatural; I take up familiar systems and alter them,” says Katchadourian, whose projects order — and occasionally disorder — her surroundings in ways that Art in America describes as “winsomely funny and philosophically rich.”

Among the works in All Forms of Attraction will be “Mended Spiderwebs,” a series of photos from 1998 and 1999 that document Katchadourian's attempts to repair torn sections of spiderwebs by patching them with bright red sewing thread, which she applied to the web's own sticky lines using tweezers and spots of glue. “The spider always returned to the web after I left it, plucking out and rejecting my patches,” said Katchadourian, whose rejected patches are included as part of the project.

For “Handheld Subway” (1996), the artist painstakingly dissected a Manhattan subway map and photographed the spidery tangle of train lines.

A 2002 video, “Endurance,” consists of a larger-than-life image of the artist's mouth stretched into a broad smile while 10 minutes' worth of black-and-white footage from Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition is projected onto one of her front teeth. Katchadourian's smile, which becomes a painful grimace as minutes pass and facial muscles twitch, is a multilevel glimpse into human frailty and determination.

“Talking Popcorn,” a 2001 sculpture, uses a microphone and computer hidden in a popcorn machine to pick up the sound of corn popping — which the artist describes as the popcorn's own “language” — and to translate it into Morse code. The code is then transcribed into the popcorn language's mix of English words and nonsense syllables and printed on labels that accompany bags of the popped corn.

Public events for All Forms of Attraction will include a slide lecture and discussion presented by Katchadourian at 5 p.m. Saturday, June 24, followed by a reception celebrating the exhibition's opening from 6 to 7:30 p.m. A tour of the exhibition will be conducted at noon Wednesday, July 12. All events are free and open to the public.

For more information about Tang summer hours, events, and exhibitions, call 518-580-8080.

PDF: Opener 11: Nina Katchadourian: All Forms of Attraction PR_Opener_11.pdf