Microscope Gallery, Booth P6
The Armory Show 2021
at the Javits Center
September 9 – 12, 2021
Microscope is very pleased to announce its participation in The Armory Show 2021 (Booth #P6) with new works by Jeanne Liotta and Rachel Rosheger.
The sculptures and installation works by Rachel Rosheger and photographic light box collages by Liotta point to natural phenomenon — especially meteorological and astronomical events — that are not only directly involved in the making of the artworks but are used to suggest larger environmental concerns such as climate change, global warming and the positive and negative contributions of humans and their technologies on the planet and beyond.
Weather systems, energy and power and the failed dreams of innovators such as Nikola Tesla, are the focus of Rosheger’s work. Several medium-sized, free-standing or wall-based sculptures, with titles such as “Gates of heaven, a dusky hue,” and “Twister,” integrate 19th Century lighting rods and lightning rod “toppers” sourced from old barns and highly conductive metals such as copper, silver, and aluminum with fragments of LED matrix panels used in electronic billboards. The videos playing on the LED panels are composed of altered and edited footage of various storms culled from hundreds of hours of clips posted on social media by “storm chasers.”
Because of the low resolution of the LED technology Rosheger uses, in which every light on a panel corresponds to a single digital pixel, what appear to be abstract imagery gradually becomes more decipherable with distance. The custom electrical cords as well as the electronics built and programmed by the artist are also essential components of the works.
Failed visions of better futures inform Rosheger’s floor installation “Fall,” a work comprised of a swarm of twenty identical 3D printed objects based on an old style lightning rod topper that the artist has individually treated with copper and patinated to imitate decades of weathering. Additionally, Rosheger inverts the “toppers” so that their spikes touch the ground rather than reach “towards the heavens” from the highest point of a building as originally intended.
Jeanne Liotta’s new series of collage on Duratrans light box works, “Wrenched into Luminous Existence,” emphasize the dynamism and wondrousness of the universe and the duality of the sun as both a nurturing and destructive element, drawing analogies among nature, astronomy and the photographic process — all requiring light and time.
The starting point for the series are found 20th Century NASA 35mm slides of the universe — including of the moon, planets, nebulas and distant galaxies — that the artist exposed to sun rays over weeks and months resulting in their fading to an iridescent green color. One exception was made for the work “Wrenched into Luminous Existence: Sol,” to which Liotta added a sun blocking filter to the underlying slide of the sun, allowing the picture to retain its fiery orange and yellow hues.
Liotta also applied collage techniques both to the original 35mm slides as well as to the Durantrans enlargements of the slides, in the latter using cutouts of colored photographic gels in basic shapes resembling planets, stars, and light beams. The resulting works propose fictional possibilities for the yet unseen universe, albeit inspired by current knowledge and theories. For example, in “Wrenched into Luminous Existence: Bubble Universes,” an image created with a slide of the Andromeda galaxy and augmented with numerous transparent colored circles, alludes to the Bubble Theory, according to which the Big Bang generated various bubble universes with their own laws of physics that developed into individual ever-expanding universes.
A solo exhibition of works by Jeanne Liotta “The World is A Picture of the World” also opens at the gallery on September 9th, with an opening reception from 6-8pm.
For inquiries please contact the gallery at inquiries@microscopegallery.com or by phone at 347.925.1433.
To Visit:
The Armory Show, 429 11th Ave, New York, NY 10001
Thursday, September 9, 10am-8pm (VIP Preview)
Friday, September 10, 12–8pm (Pommery Soirée 5–8pm)
Saturday, September 11, 12–8pm
Sunday, September 12, 12–7pm
Masks and proof of Covid-19 vaccine or negative test required.
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Jeanne Liotta works with film, photography, collage, drawing, installation and other mediums with thematics often located at the intersection of art, science, natural philosophy, and ephemerality. Liotta’s works have been presented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, Colorado; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; The Contemporary Austin Jones Center, Austin, Texas; Inova Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; The Camera Club of NY, New York; and the Halle für Kunst und Media, Graz, Austria among others. Her films have appeared in the New York Film Festival, New York, NY; Rotterdam International Film Festival, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Cinémathèque Française, Paris, France; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; CCCB, Barcelona, Spain; The Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA; Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA; and many others. Awards include NYSCA, The Jerome Foundation, The Museum of Contemporary Cinema and The Orphans Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Award. Liotta has been a resident at the Experimental Television Center and a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Jeanne Liotta lives and works between New York and Boulder, Colorado.
Rachel Rosheger (b.1994) is an artist based in New York whose work interweaves electronics with physical materials. She often uses various earth systems such as weather or geology as points of departure to explore current technological and cultural landscapes. A solo exhibition of her work was presented at Microscope Gallery in the springin of 2021 as the inaugural exhibition in its new location in Chelsea. Her work has previously exhibited at Mery Gates, Brooklny, NY; Rhizome Parking Garage, New York, NY and 41 Cooper Square (Benjamin Menschel Fellowship Exhibition), New York, NY, among others. Screenings include at Anthology Film Archives and IFC Center in New York. Rachel Roscheger graduated with a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art in 2017 and received the 2018 Benjamin Menschel Fellowship.