24 Nov 2015

Anton Ginzburg: Hybrid Gaze at Fridman Gallery

Fridman Gallery presents Hybrid Gaze, a solo exhibition by Anton Ginzburg. The installation premieres a two-channel video End of Perspective and several other new works. Ginzburg explores the issues of representation, historical lineage and materiality in relation to current technology.

The exhibition focuses on the contemporary extension of the human eye by means of technology and the resulting dematerialization of the body, the hybrid gaze of the human and the machine. The footage for End of Perspective was filmed by two drones flying above Dutchess County. Exploring the formal possibilities of airborne camera movements and two-channel editing, End of Perspective offers a transcendent experience of nature as it is observed by the mechanical Other. The mechanical gaze of the camera is returned onto the machine itself, as the two drones view each other. Meanwhile, the representation of the landscape of the Hudson River Valley, the site that was historically definitive for American romanticism in landscape painting in mid-19th century, is activated by aerial points of view of the drone technology.

Also in the exhibition is a 16mm film Displacements, an homage to American artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt and their seminal film Swamp, which viscerally confronts issues of perception and process.

AU01 installation is a narrative based around a photo of an icon that the artist encountered on his recent trip to Sarajevo, that has been sanctified in a local church in 1971. It is explored in the context of Walter Benjamin's essays on photography and aura.

The hybrid aura of the technological and natural phenomena offers an interplay and reconsideration of distinct perspectives, distances and spatial relationships. Identifying and mediating the gaze by means of montage is a strategy to resist mastery of vision over the subject. The human body is absent from the artworks and appears indirectly through recordings and reflections of diverse media, or by presence of the viewer in the installation.

AU01 installation is a narrative based around a photo of an icon that the artist encountered on his recent trip to Sarajevo, that has been sanctified in a local church in 1971. It is explored in the context of Walter Benjamin's essays on photography and aura.

The hybrid aura of the technological and natural phenomena offers an interplay and reconsideration of distinct perspectives, distances and spatial relationships. Identifying and mediating the gaze by means of montage is a strategy to resist mastery of vision over the subject. The human body is absent from the artworks and appears indirectly through recordings and reflections of diverse media, or by presence of the viewer in the installation.

Anton Ginzburg is a New York–based artist who uses an array of historical and cultural references as starting points for his investigations into art's capacity to penetrate layers of the past and reflect on the contemporary experience. Born in 1974 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Ginzburg received a classical arts education before immigrating to the United States in 1990. He earned a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 1997 and MFA degree from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. His art has been shown at the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, White Columns in New York, Lille3000 in Euralille, France, the first and second Moscow Biennales, and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, as well as in private collections around the world.