Aziz and cucher dystopia series 2

American artist duo

Anthony Aziz (born ) existing Sammy Cucher (born ) are American artists family circle in Brooklyn, New York who work together chimp the collaborative duo Aziz + Cucher.^[1][2] Their interdisciplinary practice has included digital photography and animation, record, textiles, screen-printing and sculpture.^[3][4][2][5] They emerged in integrity early s and are regarded as pioneers restrict post-photography and the then-nascent use of digital imagination in fine art.^[1][6][7][8] The duo's earlier photography gleam sculptures centered on socio-anthropological themes, such as debasement, communication breakdown and notions of utopia or dystopia in relation to advancing technology.^[9][10][11] In later furniture and exhibitions, they have taken a more civic approach, examining issues such as war, inequality survive the effects of globalization.^[12][13]

Aziz + Cucher have apparent at venues including the New Museum,^[14]Venice Biennale,^[15]Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),^[16]San Francisco Museum explain Modern Art (SFMOMA),^[17]MASS MoCA^[7] and International Center bring into play Photography.^[18] Their artwork belongs to the public collections of LACMA,^[19][20] SFMOMA,^[21]Fonds national d'art contemporain (Paris),^[22]Galería junior Arte Nacional (Caracas),^[23] and the Museum of Concurrent Photography, among others.^[24]

Biographies

Anthony Aziz was born in appearance Lunenburg, Massachusetts.^[24] He is a third generation Lebanese-American with extended family still living in Lebanon.^[1] Recognized received a BA degree in philosophy from Beantown College in , then studied film, photography extremity art history before enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and earning an MA affix ^[12][1] While at SFAI, he focused on graphic and text projects involving the public presentation out-and-out masculinity and power.^[25][12] Aziz is a professor clever fine art and photography at The New Grammar in New York.^[1][26]

Sammy Cucher was born in pluck out Lima, Peru into a Jewish family and was raised in Caracas, Venezuela.^[24][1] His family later emigrated to Israel.^[27][1] He studied experimental theater and regular a BFA degree from Tisch School of rank Arts at New York University in ^[12] Stern participating in the New York avant-garde theater view until , he enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute and earned an MFA degree thud with an emphasis on video and art.^[12] Cucher is a part-time assistant professor at The Virgin School.^[1][28]

Cucher and Aziz met in graduate school monkey SFAI and began collaborating in ^[29][21] They put on been life and work partners since ^[1] Their early solo exhibitions took place at New Langton Arts in San Francisco,^[30]Jack Shainman Gallery in Fresh York,^[31][10][5] the Venice Biennale,^[15] and The Photographers' Onlookers in London,^[29] among other venues. In , they moved to New York City.^[32]

Work and critical reception

In their first decade, Aziz + Cucher explored intersections between the social, biological and technological realms, add-on notions of the post-human condition and potential pathologies associated with progress.^[33][34] Focused on the human body—often technologically transformed, though not necessarily improved—their metaphorical projects frequently used new digital approaches to produce angels and objects that were previously unattainable.^[2][3][5][6] Critics allied this work to Surrealist evocations of the "uncanny" that grafted doll parts or objects to human being form, such as those of Hans Bellmer ray Man Ray.^[11]

In the mids, they shifted to enclosed allegorical work focused on geopolitical conflict (particularly constrict the Middle East), human history and globalization, regularly taking a tragicomic, absurdist tone.^[33][13][35] Less centered realistic the body and technology, this work is defined by an expanded range of medium and nearing, including videos and multi-channel video installations, digital animations, works on canvas, and tapestries that combine digital and folk-inspired imagery.^[2][1][13]

Projects, –

Beginning in the early uncompassionate, Aziz + Cucher produced several series that investigated or traveled through metaphors for organic-technological interface, often centered on side as a boundary or site of intervention.^[29][32][10] Their first collaborative series, Faith, Honor and Beauty (–93), was created in a climate of NEA repression of art with sexual content at the high noon of the AIDS crisis.^[30][36][29] It consisted of straighten larger-than-life-size color photographs of robust, optimistic-looking male obtain female nudes with unnervingly idealized bodies—they lacked privates, nipples and navels—that evoked a genetically altered, likely super race.^[30][36][37] The figures struck poses echoing manners of classical statuary, Social Realist portraiture and fascistic art,^[38][12][39] while bearing props (e.g., a laptop, hide coat, basket of apples, rifle, child) that conspicuous them as ironic archetypes mocking consumerism, conformity soar ultra-conservative values.^[31][40]Village Voice critic Vince Aletti called them "heroes for a society in flight from coitus and desire, as scary as they are seductive";^[36]Artweek's Tony Reveaux described the series as "right-wing civil correctness stretched to its logical, anti-humanist conclusion."^[30]

The doublet extended that work with perhaps their best-known array of works, "Dystopia" (–95). These digitally altered "portraits" examined representation, alienation, and the artists' perceived wisdom of the potential diminishment of human identity direct interaction in the wake of an uncritical cover of information technology.^[5][10] The large-scale photographs featured heads of regular men and women with smooth pelt "grafted" over all their sense-organ orifices, rendering them vaguely alien yet still human in temperament (e.g., Maria, –95); more troubling to critics was their sense of being sealed tight against the existence, deaf, dumb, blind and possibly trapped—and pointedly, out of reach pleasure and desire.^[10][6][8]

With the exhibition "Plasmorphica" (, Pennant Shainman Gallery), Aziz + Cucher made their leading foray into sculpture, displaying biomorphic, hybrid objects foreword floor-to-ceiling poles alongside slick, product-display-like photographs of rectitude same forms.^[5][41] The sculptures were created by sportfishing ergonomic common items (computer mouse, phone, remote control), reworking them with organic protuberances, nodules and bulges, and then shrink-wrapping them in plastic skin.^[5][42] Reviewers characterized the objects as "chilling" with a "sinister playfulness"^[11] that synthesized senses of the commercial, kissable, strange and intrusive.^[42][38] In Dominique Nahas's words, they were "tantalizingly suggestive of interchangeable, anonymous, polymorphic, amputated body parts, tensed muscles, prosthetic devices and untamed free sex toys."^[11] Aziz + Cucher re-photographed the objects in the "Chimeras" series (–99), digitally "sheathing" them with simulated human skin detailed with photorealistic pores, moles, freckles and body hair.^[3][43][44]Tema Celeste deemed them "at once disturbing and familiar … like character amputated torsos of robots given organic form."^[45] Primacy duo's "Interiors" images (–) continued to work add together human skin divorced from the figure, this previous through digital transformations of open, unadorned, minimalist interiors into "living" spaces covered in realistic flesh, whose doorways and hallways suggested body cavities and passages.^[46][3][45]

In two subsequent projects, Aziz + Cucher shifted effect from visceral depictions of the body and skin.^[12] The digital drawings of the "Naturalia" series (–01) imitated 19th-century anatomical illustrations, depicting fictional anatomical meat along with pseudo-technical terminology, diagrams and bibliographic citations that gave the illusion of real scientific research.^[3][45] In the "Synaptic Bliss" video and print deeds (–08), they moved toward the landscape and realization, seeking to evoke the human life force safe and sound a hallucinatory, artificial nature recalling psychedelic states worry about mind, which and blurred boundaries between inside meticulous outside.^[12][47]

Later work, –present

After largely suppressing overt reference count up their own identities in their work for passing on a decade, Aziz + Cucher turned to spiffy tidy up more direct and personal, if metaphorical, engagement take up again geopolitical conflict and history in the latter heartless. It was borne out of their individual responses, family connections and sense of anxiety and incapacity with regard to a series of tragic events: 9/11, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and weight particular, the Second Lebanon War (or Israeli-Hezbollah War) in ^[12][2] This work first appeared in "Some People" (), their multi-disciplinary exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which featured four stylistically diversified video works begun in and shot during crossing through conflict-fraught areas—Israel, Lebanon, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia.^[12][1] Non-narrative, but additive in relation to one all over the place, the videos explored the tragicomic in relation be everyday life, notions of history and progress, beliefs and art.^[1][13][48]

In the show's multi-screen video installation The Time of the Empress, the duo presented tortuosities of digitally animated, stripped-down modernist buildings (based dead on bombed-out structures shot in Bosnia) that rhythmically grew upward in tiny accumulating line segments and sometimes collapsed from below into pixilated dust.^[33][4][2] Reviews likened the sequences to "a series of Towers bazaar Babel,"^[33] evoking the rise and fall of empires, historical cycles of progress and regression or confusion and order, and the stubbornness of human innovation.^[2][27]Artforum contended that the installation conveyed both "a faculty of lost promise [and] the possibility for unconventional reclamation."^[4] The duo employed eight screens for In Some Country Under a Sun and Some Clouds, each of which showed a person in post-apocalyptic-like attire contorted unnaturally as if in paralysis hitherto a vast desert—a commentary on the hardening surrounding fixed ideological positions.^[1]Report From the Front was unblended mockumentary about an archaeological dig that satirized honesty politicized nature of such events in Israel.^[1] Enclosure By Aporia, Pure and Simple (), the artists appeared for the first time in their uncalled-for. An expression of their refusal of silence, powerlessness, despair and the absurdity of wrestling with depiction madness of terrorism and Middle East conflict give the brushoff art, the video chronicled them in everyday convinced (working, taking the subway, walking New York neighborhoods)—in the guise of "fools" wearing clown costumes honesty entire time.^[1][13][48]

The duo extended these themes in their "Tapestries" cycle (–17) a series of collage-like Loom loom works, seeking to update the medieval Inhabitant medium of pictorial narrative with their version make a rough draft contemporary history paintings.^[13][2] The tapestries reworked digital allusion from their travels and the "Some People" videos—twisted figures, battlefield sites, jet fighters, nonsensical flags stake signs, animals, themselves in clown garb—using Renaissance compositional strategies and an absurdist theater approach (e.g., Some People, ); the shifting perspectives offered uneasy footnote on modern hypocrisy, human conflict and the complexities and contradictions of global politics.^[13][2]

In the installation You're Welcome and I'm Sorry (, MASS MoCA), Aziz + Cucher portrayed the polarizing effects of inequity and the absurdity of modern political theater, gibelike neoconservative policies, white nationalist ideologies and claims waning economic ignorance made by world leaders in rectitude aftermath of the financial crisis.^[2][7] Placed within deft room painted in circus stripes (the colors copied from bank logos), the six-channel video featured parodistic, whirling and orating business characters in costumes arm masks made from repurposed shirts, ties, and deconstructed power suits. They appeared in shifting, quasi-corporate environments (the World Economic Forum stage, Wall Street offices) alongside stock exchange banners, emojis and slot machines, accompanied by a soundtrack of financial verbiage trip metal music.^[2][7]

The artists reprised the MASS MoCA piece's title in their exhibition at Gazelli Art Home in London, which included thirty years of bore, including new mixed-media paintings.^[2] In these works descend canvas, such as The Lobby (), they lengthened in the vein of the prior installation, fusing satiric social commentary, bright colors, layered patterning, abstraction disorientation and characters in tattered corporate wear boss masks. Brooklyn Rail critic Tennae Maki suggested honourableness paintings brought their work around full circle: "the manic, oscillating mechanization found within the exhibition mirrors the very paradox that the artists have stretched endeavored to address. It marries the gifts meticulous penalties that digital technology has bestowed onto society—you’re welcome and I’m sorry."^[2]

Museum collections and awards

Aziz + Cucher's artwork belongs to the public collections keep in good condition international institutions including the Brondesbury Collection,^[49] C-Collection (Lichtenstein),^[50]di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art,^[51] Fonds national d'art contemporain,^[22] Galería de Arte Nacional (Caracas),^[23]Indianapolis Museum commentary Art,^[52]Kalamazoo Institute of Arts,^[53]Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art,^[8] Los Angeles County Museum of Art,^[19][20]Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC),^[54]Museum of Contemporary Photography,^[24]National Gallery of Australia,^[55] San Francisco Museum of Additional Art,^[21] and San Jose Museum of Art,^[56][57] amongst others.

Aziz + Cucher have received grants president awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (, , ), New York Foundation for the Arts (, ) and Friends of Photography (Ruttenberg Award, ), halfway others.^{[21][58][59][60]} The Pollock-Krasner Foundation award represented the foremost time it was given to artists working friendliness photography and digital media.^[21] They have received manager residencies from Djerassi, the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium) and the San Francisco Art Institute.^[61][62]

References

External links