TIVON RICE • A MACROCOSMIC ZERO
Above: Detail of a monitor from A Macrocosmic Zero, 2010; below: video of the installation.
excerpt from 3 Studies for a Portrait of Nicolás Varchausky, 2009
Video, 20” LCD monitor, HD drive
Edition of 3
exerpt from 3 Studies for a Portrait of Stelios Manousakis, 2010
Video, 20” LCD monitor, HD drive
Edition of 3
Self Portrait (3 years, 2 months, 10 days), 2006-2009
Image burned into CRT monitor, acrylic shelf
Unique [SOLD]
For his second solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project, the video and installation work of Tivon Rice in A MACROCOSMIC ZERO is its own creation and its own cancellation. It is at once: the thing itself, the thing assaulting and transforming itself, and the thing finally destroying itself. It is a system operating as its own logic for being—a logic concerned with the self-referential, the tele-visual and entropy. Working with a combination of live video capture, a motion actuated camera, light elements, architecture, video monitors, projection, and real-time computer processing of video and audio feedback, this is Rice’s most ambitious installation to date. Like a new-media-Minimalist, Rice explores the transformation of televised information to pure form, light and experience. In his environments, the viewer’s consciousness of a physical experience confronts the normally passive function of watching new media works. Engaging spectator’s awareness of, and proximity to color, time and space, Rice creates opportunities for active viewing. Complimenting this major installation, we are also pleased to be debuting a suite of video ‘portrait studies’ using similar feedback strategies and loosely based on the paintings of Francis Bacon.
FEEDBACK
In the simplest terms, A MACROCOSMIC ZERO is a light-based, kinetic sculpture for the creation of video feedback loops with real-time image processing and presentation. Video feedback is normally created by turning a camera on its own image, creating a nearly instantaneous infinite loop or ‘hall of mirrors’. Historical precedents exploring this phenomenon presented a limited or overly simplistic vision; the promise of an infinite abyss of reflections and transformations of the video image was crippled by hardware limitations in both camera and screen. By synthesizing feedback with advanced video-delay software (developed with programmer/artist James George) processing at the pixel level, real-time audio, and precisely automated camera motion, in this work Rice is able to control the image’s rate and direction of decay, creating a dynamic vocabulary of colors, textures, rhythmic reductions, mutations, and expansions in space and time--.
THE VIDEO PORTRAITS
Perhaps no artist has better depicted the intervallic rhythm of mutations in time and space than Francis Bacon. His figure’s flesh constantly rises and falls in diastolic-systolic opposition, creating physical volume as residue of violent action. The resulting tactile deformations flow from the visual domain to that of visceral sensation.
Similar to Brassaï’s matrices of reflecting frames, the rigid geometry of cubes and balustrades that appear in so many of Bacon’s paintings provide a stable ground in which a figure’s decomposition can be measured. Indeed, the intervals between individual frames of Bacon’s triptychs further emphasize a temporal metric through which figures continually accumulate and erode. While Bacon considered the distancing, or removal of the image from its original fact to be a violent, haunting action, he continually drew upon photographic documents as references for his figures. This paradoxical relationship with the transmitted image can similarly be seen in early video experiments, as artists like Nam Jun Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Graham challenged the notions of presence and presentation within tele-visual media.
Rice recognized that both historically and formally, the portrait provides an extremely stable armature upon which a multitude of sensations can be hung. As the recognizable human form persists through the most brutal assaults on the figure, it offered him the ideal raw material to be manipulated, scrubbed, enlarged, diminished, erased, and resurrected. With this new body of video portrait studies, Rice’s environment allows for a great degree of control over the delay, speed, motion, color, and sound of the process, giving the artist the opportunity to respond to the current energy of the feedback. This observation and control is invaluable in designing the logic of the system and finished look and feel of the portraits’ disintegration.
BIOGRAPHY
Tivon Rice (b. 1978) is a multimedia artist and current doctoral student at the University of Washington's Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS). Rice began his exploration of image and form at the University of Colorado, where he received a BFA in both Electronic Media and Sculpture (2000). He continued these investigations in the University of Washington's Masters program in Sculpture, during which time he began his studies in experimental video with Shawn Brixey. Since earning his MFA in 2006, Rice has received numerous local and national awards including the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and the Artist Trust Fellowship. He has exhibited extensively with solo shows at the Portland Art Academy; 911 Media Arts Center, Seattle; Lawrimore Project, Seattle; Gallery 4Culture; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; and a collaborative exhibition with Jeffry Mitchell at The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Scion Installation Space, Los Angeles; Cornish Art Gallery, Seattle; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University; and PICA, Portland. His work is in numerous prestigious private collections in New York, London, San Francisco, Boise, Los Angeles, Houston and Seattle, and in the permanent collections of The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; The Portland Art Museum; and The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa.
Tivon Rice lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A MACROCOSMIC ZERO is the result of research conducted over the past year with DXARTS’ faculty and students. The artist wishes the thank DXARTS for critical support and guidance. He would also like to thank James George for software and creative assistance as well as 911 Media Arts Center for ongoing support.
Above: exerpt from 3 Studies for a Portrait of Eric Thompson, 2010
Video, 20” LCD monitor, HD drive
Edition of 3
exerpt from 3 Studies for a Portrait of Bronwyn Lewis, 2010
Video, 20” LCD monitor, HD drive
Edition of 3
2/18/10
LAWRIMORE PROJECT
