Two of Bowen’s kinetic sculptures, Fly Lights and Tele-Present Wind, are currently on view at Redux. Fly Lights, an orb containing house flies, is suspended from the ceiling in Redux’s first gallery. Encircling the sphere are spotlights aimed at the eye level of the viewer. The movement of the flies triggers the ring of spotlights to flash. Tele-Present Wind, located in Redux’s main gallery, consists of forty two dried plant stalks, each affixed to an electronic base. Part of the work is installed in the artist’s home state of Minnesota.

During the installation of drift, I stopped by Redux to ask Bowen a few questions about the works he was exhibiting in Charleston.

Rebekah Drysdale: The main components of Tele-Present Wind are installed in the gallery at Redux. Describe the off-site component to this piece.

David Bowen: This plant is called tansy, it’s an invasive species in Minnesota, and there is a single stalk, just like this one, in Duluth, Minnesota. It is blowing around in the wind as we speak. At the base of this tansy stalk, there is a device called an accelerometer, which measures x/y tilt. There’s actually one in the iPhone. [My recording device.] The plant stalk is blown around by the wind, which causes the accelerometer to tilt, and the tilt data is collected by a computer on the Minnesota side, and then sent to these devices in the gallery in South Carolina, in real time. The gallery installation is a recreation of the physical effects of the wind in Minnesota.

RD:  Tell me more about Fly Lights. Where do you derive your fly population?

DB: You can get anything on the internet. At Spider Pharm, Inc., you can get five grams of house fly pupae for five dollars. These flies were born in Arizona, came to Minnesota, and then I shipped them down here to South Carolina. These are some well-travelled flies. The idea here is that the subtle movements of the flies are being projected onto our scale. It is rather confrontational, the lights project into our space. These flies will live for about forty days. It takes a certain quantity of them to create the activity of the lights. If there weren’t as many of them, the lights wouldn’t be going off as frequently as they are. But they will die, and that’s part of the piece. As they die, the piece will start to atrophy.

A lot of this work is about contrast. I use natural and mechanical systems. As I work with both of these systems, what I continue to find more interesting is the unpredictable things that happen. Flies can behave in fairly predictable ways, whereas machines and robots, which you would associate with behaving in systematic, predictable ways, can have an unpredictable nature.

RD: Art has long been oriented towards the object, with an increasing awareness of process. In your work, object and process are thoroughly integrated. How do you begin a piece?

Bowen's Fly Lights installed at Redux

DB: Technology is becoming very accessible, and a lot of this stuff is DIY. I’m not really inventing anything new here, I’m just appropriating things like accelerometers, or ink jet printers, or light sensors, etc., to accomplish an end result. When I first started working with art and technology, I would get really excited about a particular sensor or a particular circuit board that I could plug into my micro controller and make it spit out ink. I would think, “that’s a cool thing, there has got to be a piece I can make around that.”

With these more recent works, I’m thinking more about the idea. I think, “I would like to create something that recreates the physical movements of the wind in the gallery space.” Then I just pull from a tool box or tool set.

RD: What are you working on now?

My most recent project is Tele-Present Water. It’s a wave form, and I have one going right now at Esther Klein Gallery in Philadelphia. It’s a very small undulating wave that pulls data from a NOAA data buoy in the Pacific Ocean. These data buoys are all over the world.

RD: How did you access the buoy’s data?

DB: Anybody can access it. You just get onto NOAA and pull data off of these buoys. You can get wind speed, wind direction, water temperature, outside temperature, surface depth, but you can also get wave height and wave frequency. I’m using that data in real time to articulate a sculpture that is, as we speak, undulating up and down in the gallery space in Philadelphia. It’s based on what’s accessible. It’s really amazing that artists, and I think there are a lot of us now, such as Aaron Koblin and Chris Jordan, are finding ways to use available data collections in their pieces. Due to the accessibility of the web, there is an ease in transmitting and finding data. Things like this weren’t possible ten or fifteen years ago.

RD: You have been selected for The Arctic Circle 2011 Residency. Tell me more about what that opportunity entails.

DB: It’s an ice class vessel that starts off from an island north of Norway. It’s actually ten degrees from the Arctic Circle. I will be spending two weeks aboard this vessel, sailing around the Arctic Circle with other artists and researchers. I will take an accelerometer with me, and mount it to the boat. The boat will obviously be physically affected by the waves, and I will collect data from that accelerometer and use that to articulate a sculpture. Basically, I will be collecting the physical effects on me. I have a good friend who has a sail boat, and when you’re on a boat for an extended period of time, you get acclimated to the movement. That effect is where Tele-Present Water came from, so that is what I will be doing for the Arctic Circle Residency. I’m hoping that the large-scale wave sculpture will debut in December 2011 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Bowen’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including: Brainwave at Exit Art, New York, NY, Artbots at Eyebeam, New York, NY and Data + Art at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

Bowen was selected for a solo exhibition at Redux Contemporary Art Center as the Featured Artist of ReceiverFest, which took place March 10th-13th in Charleston, SC. drift will remain on view at Redux until April 16th.

The twentieth century has provided a plethora of methods to communicate quickly to the masses, and it is becoming increasingly rare to find anyone taking the time to write a handwritten letter, much less create a large-scale public mural to share ideas with the public. However, for almost all of human history, wall paintings have served as one of the most effective ways to chronicle the events and progress of our time. Artist Josef Kristofoletti has tapped back into this method of communication and it has led him to some amazing places. From the gymnasium of his former high-school to a year long road trip around North America with the Transit Antenna artist collective, Josef’s desire to paint in public spaces has kept him moving. Perhaps the most impressive of these large-scale murals took place at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the Northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border. There, Kristofoletti created a four story mural of the ATLAS particle accelerator, directly on the walls that contain the actual structure. Since the completion of the project just a few months ago, I’ve been dying to talk with the artist about his experience of seeing the world’s most ambitious laboratory, as well as the completion of his most impressive mural to date.

Seth Curcio: So Joe, you recently had the unique opportunity to do an artist residency of sorts at the famous CERN, the European Organization of Nuclear Research on the boarder of Switzerland and France. You had the honor of being the first artist invited to produce an original work of art for the organization. Tell me what projects led up to this invitation and how did the world’s largest and most advanced scientific laboratory learn about your work ?

Josef Kristofoletti: In 2008, I made a painting for a two person show with my friend Matt Phillips at Redux Contemporary Art Center. Matt and I had some conversations before the exhibit about what we wanted to show. We talked about the origin of the universe and dark matter, then I decided that I would do something related to CERN. I painted a mural of ATLAS, the largest of the CERN particle detectors. I tried to make the mural scientifically accurate, based on the schematics available on the CERN website. After the show opened it got a little bit of press and a month or so later I got a call from Claudia Marcelloni, the photographer and outreach coordinator for the ATLAS experiment. She told me that they had seen photos of my mural and asked if I might be interested in doing something on location. I couldn’t believe it at first, it just sounded really strange over the phone. We set up a time for a meeting with some of the physicists and I booked a flight to Geneva that same day.

SC: Once you arrived at CERN, the officials gave you a tour of the facility, allowing you, an artist, unprecedented access to such highly restricted laboratories. Tell me a little about what you saw and how it turned into inspiration for the gigantic painting that eventually came to be?

JK: From the airport the CERN shuttle picked me up and took me right inside the lab’s main building. I met with two incredible scientists who work there, senior physicist Michael Barnett who is the head of the Particle Data Group, from Lawrence Berkley National Labs, and Neal Hartman, who engineered the innermost part of ATLAS, the pixel detector. It was a great meeting because they were as excited to talk to me about art as I was in finding out more about super symmetry. We talked about Egyptian sculpture and cinema. Neil has since left his position at CERN to attend film school in London. Anyway, they gave me a tour of the ATLAS facilities and we looked at some of the walls that I could potentially work on. By that time the detector, which is over 90 meters underground, was completely closed off to visitors and gearing up for the cool down process. Before collisions can start the entire 27 km tunnel is chilled with liquid helium to a temperature than is cooler than outer space. As we were talking about the possibilities of the project, my guides realized that I had to see the actual detector in person. After they made a few phone calls, and I started going through the most high secure checkpoint I have ever seen. The workers go through a complex biometric security system that includes a retinal scan. They all wear a dosimeter that measures radiation levels and there are plenty of safety warning labels on everything. We took the elevator down, then stepped out to look at the beast. There were a few men inside the detector doing some last minute work, but they were reduced to ants by huge size of its metal parts . It was sublime.

SC: This sounds amazing! I bet you never imaged in a million years that your research and project about ATLAS would eventually bring you into the exact laboratory that you studied for the mural at Redux Contemporary Art Center. I’d love to hear about some of the technical obstacles that you faced when creating the work, such as the time line needed for creating such an ambitious work, how you selected your subject matter, and dealing with extreme weather on the Franco-Swiss border. I even heard that you became a dad over this whole process. It just seems larger than life, both literally and metaphorically.

JK: I couldn’t get everyone to agree on the location that I wanted for the mural. I really wanted it place directly over the detector itself, and that alone took months. By the time that process was accomplished I had to start right away even though there was no funding for the project yet. I had charged the ticket to a credit card and flew back to Geneva from the United States. My third day there I met a side show performer named Stephan who lived by the train station and offered to let me sleep in his squat. He has this act where he can eat and swallow lit cigarettes. Stephan helped me stay sane for much of the project. There were so many security and safety issues at CERN that every day new problems came up. I had to go through safety courses to get clearance to work on the site and to use the Nacelle lift, which is the machine that was used to assemble the detector itself. I could not afford any assistants because it would have taken many more months of paperwork and training. I worked through French and German interpreters on many of the logistical issues and some of the safety classes. By the time I was able to touch paint to the wall it was October and getting colder every day. One day I couldn’t feel my hand any more and I realized that I had to face reality and come back the following year. I was able to finish the smaller of the two walls by mid November and had to return in June to continue. Halfway through the painting the whole operation was stopped by one of the electrical engineers in charge of safety. I was working right over the transformers and he said that in case of an accident the power supply would be jeopardized to the whole experiment. That stopped me until further security measures were dreamed up.

Every once in a while one of the physicists would confront me, very seriously, about how some part of the detector was not drawn properly. But, I respect that because for many of them this is a life’s work. Some have been there for twenty years going over the smallest details thousands of times. The whole detector is exactly precise to within one millimeter. I tried to explain to them that I was just making a painting. From up it the air I could see Mont Blanc just to my right, and the Jura mountains to my left. When I started on the proposals I found out that my wife was pregnant. My son Daniel was seven months old when I finished the mural. A lot of what has happened I can’t put into words, its been both shocking and beautiful. While I was at CERN I saw a lecture by Stephen Hawking. He was one of my childhood heroes. The first slide he showed said: ‘Why are we here? Where did we come from?’

SC: That all seems like such a feat in itself, not to mention the fact that in the end you created an amazingly ambitious mural that lives up to all the magic that is happening inside the facility. So now that you are back in the US, what kind of projects are you working on, and what do you have coming up?

JK: Just before I came back to the US I went to Fame Festival in Italy and it was one of the most amazing art exhibitions that I have ever seen. It was so cool to see huge paintings by BLU and the other artists, I found that very inspiring. I’m really obsessed with large-scale paintings on walls and I love that the street art phenomenon keeps exploding all over the world.  My next big project, which I’m super excited about working on, will be doing something for the Olympics. Details on that project to come…

Joe Johnson‘s photographic project Mega Churches is currently on view at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston SC.  The mega church, which can be found throughout the United States, hosts a large congregation of 2,000+ evangelical worshipers and a production of often-televised religious spectacle.  It is a highly relevant subject for the contemporary visual artist to explore as the literal Biblical interpretations such mega churches typically preach influence the US socially and politically.

Johnson maintains a formal distance in his photographic series, Mega Churches, through choosing to capture these vast interior spaces in a state of absence and quiet; in doing so, he avoids human representation that could potentially veer into caricature.  In Johnson’s words, the ‘mechanics of faith’ are his focus in these photographs.  The artist hones in on the rows of seats, acrid neon and fluorescent lighting, corporate decor, theatrical stage sets, large-scale screens and behind-the-scenes computers and wires that define and facilitate the business of worship in the mega church’s arena-like space.

Today’s fundamentalist Christian mega churches appropriate entertainment technology and theatrical production to capture their audiences’ attention – and more sardonically, their pocketbooks.  Through Johnson’s visual emphasis upon the creation of artifice, the artist is perhaps commenting on the insincerity and fallacy of the message these mega spaces serve to convey.

Joe Johnson earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, both in photography.  Johnson’s photographic work has been shown throughout the United States in both solo and group exhibitions.  Johnson is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Missouri and a member of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Johnson’s Mega Churches series has been well received in the US – earning the artist runner up recognition for the 2008 Aperture Portfolio Prize.  The series was previously shown at the Gallery Kayafas in Boston MA from April through May 2009.

Mega Churches remains at Redux Contemporary Art Center through 18 December 2009.

Over the past forty five days, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina has exhibited new paintings by Matt Phillips and Josef Kristofoletti, in a show titled the The Sun Machine Is Coming Down. The exhibition uses the language of geometric abstraction to discuss scientific processes, phenomenological experiences, and the nature of illusion.

The artists, who met in graduate school at Boston University, push the boundaries of pattern, color and space, synthesizing these elements into a formal system of painting which examines the basic building blocks of matter. In an attempt to better understand the world around us, Josef Kristofoletti focused his attention on the CERN particle accelerator, the world’s largest and most expensive laboratory for particle physics. While CERN was preparing for its first ever successful collision, Kristofoletti was creating The Angel of the Higgs Boson, a large-scale painting of a cross section of the CERN accelerator on the outside walls of Redux. The end result was a strikingly bright mural that furthered the dialogue about scale, the tradition of public mural painting and scientific theory. Kristofoletti is currently a part of the mobile living experiment Transit Antenna, offering him the opportunity to create murals across the U.S.

Inside Redux, are the encompassing paintings of Matt Phillips. Phillips paintings go far beyond the modernist ideals from which they are built. They attempt to simulate situations that speak about the phenomena of deep space, energy transfer and optical illusion. Some of the paintings in the gallery reach 16 ft. in length, and incorporate paint with collage, sewn surfaces and irregularly shaped canvases. Since completing his MFA at BU, Matt Phillips has completed an exhibition with Petra Projects hosted at Mehr Gallery in NYC as well participated in Gangbusters at Plane Space Gallery, also in NYC. The artist currently teaches painting at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

The exhibition, which was curated by DailyServing.com Founder, Seth Curcio, is accompanied with a full color, 50 page catalog documenting the exhibition, including special articles and essays about the artists’ work. A limited edition catalog release event is scheduled for today at Redux and the book will be available for purchase on the DailyServing.com site by the end of next week.