Over Sight

A Master of Arts Thesis Exhibition curated by Jen Mergel

March 6–20, 2005
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 1:00–5:00 pm

From the series Still Water (The River Thames, for Example)(1999) © Roni Horn

In Over Sight, Spencer Finch, Roni Horn, and Kerry Tribe challenge our assumptions of what we can and cannot see. Weaving image with language, each alludes to a hidden presence. Footnotes annotate photographs of water to hint at what lurks below, a haiku inspires watercolors that reveal the gaps in our perception, and voiced questions haunt videos of landscapes with conjectures on the past and future. Suggesting blind spots and uncertainty in our sight and memory, their works bring us to the threshold between a visible surface and the unknown beyond.

• Essay: Over Sight
• Exhibition Checklist
• Public Programs
• Exhibition Installation Views
• Contact the Curator

+ Special Thanks to Abigail Miller & Neasa Coll at the Bow & Arrow Press for the superb commemorative prints, and to Erin Cannan, Dean of Students, to Allen Josey, Director of Student Life Programming, and to Alan Wolfzahn at Chartwells for the generous program funding & support!

For further information or directions, Please call 845.758.7598

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Essay: Over Sight

Still from Florida (2003), projected video installation with sound © Kerry Tribe

Suppose these works by Roni Horn, Spencer Finch, and Kerry Tribe are “things like doors” that mark the threshold to an unpassable zone. As resonant cues to an unseen presence, how might they incite our curiosity to what lies beyond yet firmly resist a certain conclusion? Using language to allude to what cannot be seen, how might they provoke us to approach a closed surface—and open our minds?

In their recent works that weave words with image, footnotes annotate photographs of water to hint at what lurks below, a haiku inspires watercolor “mistakes” to explore gaps in our vision, and voices that guess about the appearance of “heaven” haunt video scenes of tropical paradise. In such combinations, Horn, Finch, and Tribe create poetic frictions between image and language to reveal blind spots and uncertainties in our sight and memory. Exposing us to the boundaries of our perception, Over Sight invites us to question these limits by challenging our assumptions of what we can and cannot see.

Given the non-stop pace of Internet uploads and satellite television (media sources that inundate us with infinite stores of instant information), the opportunities for slow looking, listening, and reading may become increasingly rare. The works of Horn, Finch, and Tribe force our racing minds to take pause; to wonder in paradox; to wander in doubt; and may even allow us to see ourselves seeing. These self-reflexive interactions at the closed door of non-sight prompt our openness to an alternate insight, or “over sight”—a knowledge of an unseen, unremembered, or incomprehensible presence that supercedes our walled-in seeing.

The works in Over Sight suppose our encounters with seemingly familiar subjects to be delicately balanced events of poetic relation and subjective engagement with the unknown and the unknowable.

Doors
by Robert Kelly

Suppose you didnt know what a door is. That it opens, for instance. It would seem a different part of the wall, thinner, more resonant. A decorative rectangle set in the wall, an embodiment of some geometrical mystery like the Golden Section. It would seem tantalizing to someone trapped in the room—a perverse, mean tease: the wall is thin here, soft, but still unpassable. How little it would take to get through the wall, yet you cant.

Suppose you didnt know what a door is, that it can open, that its resistance defines the zone of least resistance, but that zone requires a deft use of something learned, a knack, a skill: twisting the knob and pulling. Or pushing. Even if you got as far as turning and pulling, if the door were the kind that opened outward, you’d still never guess, never get through.

Suppose all round us there are things like doors in things like walls and we never knew.

“Doors,” originally published in Under Words (1983).
Reprinted in Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995).
Used with kind permission of Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of English and Co-director of the Writing Program in Fiction and Poetry, Bard College.

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Exhibition Checklist

Moonlight (Luna County, New Mexico, July 13, 2003) (2003) © Spencer Finch

1. Roni Horn (b. 1955. Lives and works in New York.)
   Ten units from the fifteen-part series
   Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 1999
   Installation of fifteen color-offset lithographs of photographs with footnotes on uncoated paper (Exhibition copy, Edition of 7)
   Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
   Can you ever step in the same river twice? As time slips by, is it still the same water? Are you still the same you? In this series of images with footnotes, Roni Horn compels us to slow down and wade through such questions about identity’s shifting nature. Skimming over the distinguishing details of each photograph, we find floating there scattered references to water’s multiple connotations and conflicting qualities. As we move to follow the flow of images and read their hints of what lingers unseen below the surface, we too are swept into the whirling current of their force.
   
2. Spencer Finch (b. 1962. Lives and works in New York.)
   Three units from the continuing series Peripheral Error (after Moritake), 2004
   - Archaeopropana demophon
   - Gonepteryx rhamni
   - Callophrys augustinus
   Each: Watercolor on paper
   Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York
   In this continuing series on “Peripheral Error,” Spencer Finch was inspired by the haiku of Moritake (1472-1549) that succinctly describes the surprising beauty of a perceptual mistake. While at first glance, these watercolors may appear to be simple abstract gestures, the Latinate names lining the bottom of the works cue us to what these blurred images in fact are. Each is Finch’s painstaking depiction of a particular species of butterfly, as seen at the peripheral margin of his field of vision while his eyes remained fixed on the middle of the page. To recreate this viewing situation, stare into the paper’s center from 18 inches away—and you too may glimpse what Moritake saw five centuries ago:
   The falling flower
   I saw drift back to the branch
   is a butterfly
   
3. Kerry Tribe (b. 1973. Lives and works in Los Angeles.)
   Florida, 2003
   Installation with single-channel video projection (21 min. loop), audio (46 min. loop) and five color-offset photographs
   Courtesy of the artist
   What does paradise look like? How do you know?—have you ever been there? In Kerry Tribe’s installation, such unquantifiable questions are answered by unseen speakers: elderly retirees who have flocked to Florida’s mythic “fountain of youth” at the end of their lives. If you pause to sit and listen to their comments, you may notice that the imagery of lush tropical swamps and sunny citrus groves begins to repeat, while the length of the spoken anecdotes runs on its own accord. This deliberate disjoint between image and language yields a slippage between what we see and what we hear, evoking such lapses in memory as déjà vu or amnesia, while exploring the poignant balance of forgetting the past to live in the present.
   
4. Spencer Finch
   Moonlight (Luna County, New Mexico, July 13, 2003), 2003
   Fluorescent light with filters (AP, Edition of 100)
   Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York
   While artists have long depicted the moon’s guiding night light as a full circle or crescent form, Spencer Finch captures the illusion of a moonbeam in a single fluorescent tube. Fascinated by notions of empirical “truth” in science and the allusive etymology of names, Finch wore all three hats of physicist, poet, and artist to reproduce the exact color and intensity of lunar glow that was emitted as he recorded it, standing with a light sensor in the empty scrubland of Luna County on the summer eve documented in the work’s title
   
5. Roni Horn
   Saying Water (The River Thames, for Example), 2001
   Audio CD (61:35 min.) produced by Dia Art Foundation
   Used with kind permission of the artist
   Through Saying Water, Horn extends her interrogation of the River’s moving psychological undercurrents. Here, the sound of her voice floods the corridor between the exhibition galleries with resonant stories and haunting memories of those overpowered by its unseen depths.
   
6. Spencer Finch
   Two units from the seven-part series Wandering Lost on the Mountains of Our Choice, 1999
   -Clouds (Annapurna, 1994)
   -Snowstorm (Baintha Brakk, 1977)
   Each: Glass mosaic and acrylic on wood
   Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York
   Embedded in these deceptively serene mosaic patterns are the images of blizzard “white outs” whose breathtaking opacity and density enveloped the mountaineers who photographed them while climbing the world’s highest peaks. Translating this condition of indistinguishabity through exact reproductions in glass, Spencer Finch encapsulates poet W.H. Auden’s (1907-1973) notion of the disorienting Modern experience as “wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice.” This reference laces the seductive grids with the subtle suggestion that the heroic impulse to scale Olympian heights might blind us from finding our way, and ourselves.
   
7. Kerry Tribe
   Here & Elsewhere, 2002
   Two-channel synchronized video projection with sound (10 min. loop) (Exhibition copy, Edition of 5)
   Courtesy of the artist
   This paired projection of footage shot with two inward-pointing cameras simulates a cross-eyed “doubling” as it focuses on an unusual cross-examination. Interrogated with existential questions about perception and memory, a precocious 10-year-old offers unscripted answers on her views of here and elsewhere, what has past and what is yet unseeable. Through this cross-over experiment between documentary and fiction, Kerry Tribe presents us with a character whose indeterminate innocence challenges our certainty of whether she is “being” herself or “playing” herself, as she expounds on distinctions between essence and appearance.
   
8. Kerry Tribe*
   Northern Lights, 2005
   16-mm film with sound
   Courtesy of the artist
   * Please Note: Film screenings are at select times only:
   ALL WELCOME to the East-coast premiere …
   5:15 pm Wednesday March 9 in the CCS Auditorium
   5:30 pm Wednesday March 16 in the Avery Theatre

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Public Programs

The falling flower

I saw drift back to the branch

is a butterfly

—Moritake (1472-1549)

All Public Programs are open to the public and free of charge

March 9, Wednesday
Poetry Reading: Over Sight, Under Words
Center for Curatorial Studies, 5:30 p.m.
(Reception with the poets begins at 5:00 p.m.)
Reading by Bard faculty including John Ashbery, Robert Kelly, Ann Lauterbach, David Levi Strauss, and Bard students Annie Christian, Thalia Forbes, Jenny Hendrix, Zachary Kitnick, Johanna Klotz, Patricia No, and Patrick Tesh.
The reading will touch on themes such as the friction between image and language, the paradox of rendering the unseen visible, and the significance of making the forgotten memorable. Faculty will read from their own selected works, and students will present new writing in response to the works in the exhibition Over Sight.

March 16, Wednesday
Artist's Talk: Kerry Tribe in Over Sight
Avery Film Center Theater, 5:30 p.m.
(Reception with the artist follows at 6:30 p.m.)
Los Angeles-based artist Kerry Tribe presents recent film and video works including those on view in the exhibition Over Sight. The talk concludes with the East-coast premiere of the 16-mm film Northern Lights (2005).

March 19, Saturday
Interactive Children's Tour of Over Sight: The Butterfly Hunt!
Center for Curatorial Studies, 2:00 p.m
(Milk and Cookies Reception follows at 3:30 p.m.)
Chase away winter and find spring surprises in The Butterfly Hunt!
This FREE tour of the exhibition Over Sight is designed for children of all ages—especially those 10 and under—to explore this unique expedition through the CCS museum galleries. For 90 minutes participants can: scout the show for glimpses of butterflies; test their snow vision; listen for sounds of tropical swamps; discover the colors of moonlight; ask and answer questions; and enjoy milk and cookies after the fun of the hunt! The tour will be led by exhibition curator, Jen Mergel.
(Tips: for comfort, please wear casual clothes with pockets. Children under 10, please bring an adult.)

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