September 5, 2002
Contact: Mark Polishook (509-963-1245/fax 509-963-1239/e-mail: polishoo@cwu.edu)
SEATTLE, Wash. - The Jack Straw New Media Gallery presents “Revisiting September 11, 19[72],” an installation by Central Washington University professors Mark Polishook, music, and Lisa Hutton, art. The work was commissioned for Jack Straw’s 2002/03 New Media Gallery season.
The opening reception for “Revisiting September 11, 19[72]” will be Wednesday, Sept. 11 at 7:30 p.m. at 4261 Roosevelt Way N.E. The evening will feature a presentation by Polishook and Hutton as part of the monthly Composer Spotlight series. Admission is free.
To explore how the events of Sept. 11, 2001, have transformed social memory, Polishook and Hutton compiled a database of animation and sound that features images from 1972 and excerpts from National Public Radio coverage from Sept. 11, 2001. Polishook and Hutton edited and processed their materials significantly. They will arrange and project them in the installation with immersive sound and video so that New Media Gallery visitors will not just be perusing a collection of archival clips. Rather, the installation amplifies and recasts the source materials to interpret them and bring out nuances that might not otherwise exist.
The artists view 1972, with fashions such as platform shoes and bellbottoms trousers, the debut of the popular TV show “All in the Family,” press coverage of a meeting between President Richard Nixon and Elvis, and traumas that include the Vietnam War and the terrorism of the Munich Olympics, as a time of contradiction. It is a period removed enough from the present such that it stands apart with its own issues and concerns. Unfortunately, it is precisely the contradictions and subtleties, the nuances, of such times that are lost in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
By connecting the seemingly mundane year of 1972 to the present day, Polishook and Hutton suggest that trauma dissolves memory by reshaping our understanding of what is and what was.
Memory and perception, as experienced in their work, is fleeting and ephemeral - paradoxically present and absent.
The installation thus marks the events of Sept. 11 by examining and placing them in the larger context of the past.
The Web version of “Revisiting September 11, 19[72]” is supported by The Center for Research in Computing in the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California San Diego. Please visit http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/revisiting.
“Revisiting September 11, 19[72]” was selected for the Jack Straw Gallery Residency Program by a panel that included Beth Sellars (Public Art Specialist at Seattle Arts Commission and curator, Suyama Gallery), Frank Video (videographer) and Don Fels (installation artist and former active server pages artist).
The Jack Straw New Media Gallery is supported by the King County Arts Commission hotel/motel tax fund, Seattle Arts Commission, Washington State Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, PONCHO, Corporate Council for the Arts, Allen Foundation for the Arts and individual contributors.
About the artists:
Polishook is a composer and a jazz pianist working in acoustic and electro-acoustic genres with traditional instruments and laptop and handheld computers. He has been a visiting composer at the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at University of California-Santa Barbara, a senior Fulbright lecturer in the electro-acoustic music studio at the Krakow Academy of Music, and a resident artist in the television/new media department at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Emmy award-winning director Andrea Weiss developed his electronic chamber opera, “Seed of Sarah,” based upon the Holocaust memoir of the same name by Judith Magyar Isaacson, into an independent film. “Seed of Sarah” has been seen across the United States, Europe and New Zealand.
A semi-finalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition and a finalist in the Great American Jazz Piano Competition, Polishook has performed as a jazz pianist with Ted Curson, MarkMurphy, Cassandra Wilson, Kenny Garret, John Blake and Eddie Gomez, among others.
Polishook holds a doctorate in composition from the Hartt School of Music, a master of music degree in jazz from the Manhattan School of Music and a master of arts in composition from the University of Pittsburgh. He currently directs the composition/theory program in the CWU music department.
Hutton is a media artist working primarily in digital imaging, net.art, sound, and text. Hutton uses the Internet as a venue for low-technology interventions that critique assumptions of truth, gender and technology. Her work has been exhibited in diverse venues including the 5th and 7th New York Digital Salons, LA Freewaves at MOCA Los Angeles, the Downey Museum of Art in Downey, Calif., the Walker Art Center's Beyond Interface, the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts in Skopje, Macedonia, ISEA '97 Chicago, and Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. Her net.art is supported by the Center for Research in Computing in the Arts (CRCA) in La Jolla, Calif. Two works of net.art have received mentions: “Woman Words” was honored by the New Media International Design Festival, New York City in 1998 and “Cyber*Babes” was honored by Prix Ars Electronica in 1996.
Hutton holds a bachelor of arts degree (summa cum laude) in visual art and literature writing and a master of fine arts degree in visual art from the University of California, San Diego. She is currently a professor of computer art at CWU. She has been getting along very well with computers since 1987 and is sometimes seen using rollerblades.
