Yumiko Furukawa, Kenny Hunter, Wu Ta-Kun, and Mariana Viegas

June 4th – July 30th, 2005

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Yumiko Furukawa
Tent for Poet (2005) (multimedia installation with tent, furnishings, video & DVD) is a work dedicated by the artist to a poet living in New York. “This tent is for her, her words, her language, her poems, and her world. She lives in New York City, but I think that she needs a change of pace. The tent is easy to move. She can move it whenever she wants to go to a new place.” Conceptually, the tent functions as a metaphor for the artist’s experience in New York City in particular in her relation and practice of the English language and ensuing communicational issues that she handles with humor and lightness.

Kenny Hunter
Citizen Firefighter (2001) (resin sculpture), was conceived primarily to celebrate the men and women of Strathclyde Brigade in Scotland. It is also an attempt to reclaim the political and civic space associated with the historical form of the public statue. While maintaining the clear, formal language of the past, the content and narrative of the work differ in many ways from historical tradition. The form has been treated reductively.

Subtraction peels away pathos. The work itself is left partially open, thus creating a space which can be reinvested by the onlooker. This in turn prompts us to come to terms with our own responsibility, not only as onlooker, but also as a citizen.

Untitled (2005) (painting and drawing) was conceived and made in New York. The statues and signage of the city have given the artist access to a pool of inherited historical and social experience from which to work.

Wu Ta-Kun
Flourishing Blue Sky (2005) (single channel video, 15 min)
The driving force behind Wu Ta-Kun’s varied body of work is expanding “ideas of sensibility”. He does this by investigating different mediums with unwavering humor. For Flourishing Blue Sky, the artist has devised a rotating mechanism that allows him to capture his journey in Manhattan on video: earth, horizon, and sky are looped in a continuous narrative. The spinning effect mimics the sense of dizziness and displacement experienced by the artist in his encounter with the city. Ta-Kun says “I enjoy this kind of confusion and fall into it. Everything is so true; everything is untrue, but the world will not stop rotating.”

Two video installations, Illusion and The Pink Doll, will also be exhibited.

Mariana Viegas
Landscape Within (consists of a DVD, The man in the center, 2005 and 3 C-prints from the series Borrowed Landscape, 2004-2005).
Landscape is an entity –or a body– which is transformed by our presence and which, in turn, transforms us. With this association in mind, Mariana Viegas observes in her photographic and video work the daily rituals performed by people in the green spaces created within the urban habitat. Under the camera, the locations and situations that she films show up as sets, and ordinary people that move within them seem to be directed. Of this body of work the artist says “In these fake set-ups of reality I want to evoke the possibility of a narrative existing upon what surrounds us, by taking a closer and longer view.”

Yumiko Furukawa’s residency is supported by the Asian Cultural Council; Kenny Hunter’s by the James McBey Fellowship, administered by Aberdeen City Council; Wu Ta-Kun’s by the Yageo Tech-Art Award of the Asian Cultural Council; Mariana Viegas’ by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Luso-American Development Foundation.

Location One is a not-for-profit organization devoted to the convergence between visual, performing and digital arts in a time of rapidly changing technology.

Location One’s International Residency Program is the central focus of its activities. It encourages collaboration by inviting artists from all over the world, and working in different media, to experiment with advanced technological tools and delivery systems, and to develop new work.