CHRIS DOYLE & BRENT GREEN IN FILM SECTOR AT ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to announce the participation of artists Chris Doyle and Brent Green in the Film Sector at Art Basel Miami Beach (December 4 – 7, 2014). On view will be Chris Doyle’s Waste_Generation (2010) and Brent Green’s To Many Men Strange Fates Are Given (2011-12).
Waste_Generation is a seven-minute animated film that broaches the subject of consumption and transformation, specifically with regard to a world dependent on technology. Waste_Generation is the second of a series of five films based on The Course of Empire, a five-part series of paintings by the 19th-century Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole. Doyle drew inspiration from Desolation, the last painting of Cole’s Empire series, to create Waste_Generation. Cole’s painting shows the last stage of empire: a civilization in ruins with its capital city covered in vegetation and devoid of inhabitants.
Working on this theme of decay, Doyle’s film shows a dumpsite for outmoded tools of production, such as computers and oil drills, which dissolve into a paper mill whose smokestack generates paper money that, in turn, mutates into the pulsating plant life of a jungle. The film then leads into a sequence of kaleidoscopic imagery only to return to the original dumpsite. The film’s message can easily be construed as political but, as the artist points out, it is more about our dichotomous relationship with technology¬⎯how it threatens to consume us while also extending our physical limits.
Brent Green’s film, To Many Men Strange Fates Are Given, also touches upon the ways in which humans cope with the dual nature of technology. Green’s ten-minute animated film tells the story of the woman who sewed the spacesuit for Laika, the Russian space dog that was the first animal to orbit the Earth.
Narrated by the artist, Fates articulates themes of progress and insight, of invention, wonder and faith, echoing the ideas of British poet and novelist Stevie Smith (1902-1971) and former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971). Moreover, the film represents a prime example of Green’s deft incorporation of technology into his sophisticated handmade aesthetic.
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Chris Doyle was born in 1960 in Easton, Pennsylvania. He received his BFA from Boston College and a graduate degree in architecture from Harvard University. In addition to making sculpture, animations and watercolors, he has created many public art works. They include Commutable (1996), for which he gilded the steps of the Manhattan Bridge; Leap (2000), a large-scale video projection displayed on the façade of 2 Columbus Circle; and most recently, Bright Canyon (2014), a film that was shown on the electronic billboards of Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment series presented by The Times Square Advertising Coalition. Selected collections of Doyle’s work include the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth University, the Deutsche Bank Art Collection, NY, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor.
Brent Green was born in 1978 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a self-taught, animated filmmaker living and working in rural Pennsylvania. A 2005 Creative Capital grantee, Green’s sculptures, films, live performances and drawings have been exhibited in venues ranging from rooftops across the globe to renowned art institutions such as MoMA, NY, The Kitchen, New York, Sundance Film Festival and The J. Paul Getty Center, LA. Green’s solo exhibitions include Art Basel Miami Beach (2009), SITE Santa Fe (2010), and the Berkeley Art Museum (2010). Public collections of Green’s work include MoMA, NY; the Progressive Collection, Cleveland; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, LA; and Arizona State University, Tempe.