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Afro Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise)Post an Event »

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

November 6 - December 14, 2008

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480 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612
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Afro Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise)
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Bay Area artist David Huffman, Dig it!, paintings & drawings; and Washington DC artist Jefferson Pinder, Afro Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise), performance video & c-prints. Exhibition dates are November 6 through December 13, 2008. The artists' reception is Thursday, November 6, from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. An illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition of David Huffman. PSG is pleased to welcome Jefferson Pinder from Washington, DC in his first exhibition at the gallery. Born in 1970, Pinder received an undergraduate degree in theater, and an MFA in painting and mixed media from the University of Maryland. A video performance artist, he gained national attention with the exhibition Frequency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2006. In this exhibition was Car Wash Meditations, a short video of a car rolling through a carwash to the music of Nas’s “Made You Look,” while explosive colors of soap manifest as action painting on the screen. The combination of sound and image is set against a profile of a black man, Pinder, seated in the car. Such is the complexity of Pinder, who intuitively applies his knowledge of music, imagery, and performance to address complex issues of race, ethnicity, and class. Since that exhibition, Pinder has successfully conjoined music and video in the likes of Shoeshine Variations, Juke, and now Afro Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise). For this exhibition, Jefferson Pinder presents a single channel video projection along with a series of performance photographs. Afro Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise) is composed of over 2000 individually posed photographs. Taking cues from late 1960s experimental films, Pinder plants himself within his work and asks the viewer to watch the images of propulsion and power. In the opening of the video, Pinder is seen painting his head and neck with white paint, referencing the performers of Butoh. He places himself in front of a screen, while layered imagery from such sources as ‘60s NASA Apollo footage, Freedom Now marches, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King speeches, and movies such as The Right Stuff, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Apollo 13 are projected upon him. Using time-lapse animation, Pinder is viewed in the web of the films’ imagery. The music for the video, a pipa played by Liu Fang, matches the cadence of the performance. The title of the music, “The Ambush,” amplifies the sense of exaggerated time. Afro Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise) was created in response to an invitation to exhibit at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta for the exhibition After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, which opened in June 2008. The exhibition asked the question, How have Black artists born after 1968 feel their expression has changed as a result of the Civil Rights Movement? This question posed many problems for the participants; thus each artist addressed his/her answer in unique, inquiring ways. Jefferson Pinder was interested in exploring the Cosmos, or Space – “Cosmos” implying his vision of an active void. He references Ilya Kabakov's “The Man Who Flew Into Space from his Apartment” as an influence on the feeling and mood he was trying to capture – the conflict of breaking free. Pinder also references a more personal narrative – a memory – as his sister recalls rolling out the TV to watch the NASA Apollo launch, and how it stirred the imaginations of millions of people. Pinder talks of the final sequences of the performance: "Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘Mountain Top’ speech was particularly influential toward the end of the piece as a blazing capsule streaks across the picture plane from all angles. The final moments of this performance video do not echo the utopian vision of the Civil Rights Movement, but rather the grim reality of smoldering smoke and a figure that is still standing after a turbulent ride." Recent exhibitions include shows at the High Museum in Atlanta, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland and G-Fine Art in Washington DC. Pinder's work has been written about in the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Art in America, the New York Times, Artillery, NY Arts magazine, and others.