Born: 1971, Seoul, South Korea
Lives and Works: Berlin and Seoul

Haegue Yang's art resists a defining medium, engaging instead with a range of means, from wall drawing to books, sculpture, installation, moving image, and photography. The oblique self-analysis that Yang uses as both strategy and substance in her "placeless" art is symptomatic of someone who has lived for many years outside of her native country and whose life and work entail the high-mobility and in-transit condition common to many contemporary artists operating internationally. This acute sense of provisional belonging--being at home in what is foreign and feeling foreign in what is home--lends Yang's work a hair-trigger sensitivity for the inflections of quotidian experience as well as public and private territories. She has described her practice in terms of a poetic activism. Three Kinds (2008) employs commonplace objects such as venetian blinds, lights, and mirrors to create an atmosphere of dramatic intimacy. Though the specific point of conceptual departure remains obscured--Yang relates this and similar installations to abstract portraits of various individuals from Asian and European history--the interaction of the elements might be seen as a stand-in for human relations.

Artist's Lecture: Haegue Yang
Tues., Sept. 30, 5:00-6:00 p.m.
Carnegie Mellon University, McConomy Auditorium; Free
Haegue Yang's work resists a defining medium, ranging from wall drawings to sculpture, moving image, and photography. In Life on Mars, her installation Three Kinds employs such commonplace objects as venetian blinds and mirrors to create an atmosphere of dramatic intimacy, while Three Kinds in Transition features a poetic sequence of images of globes and origami. Cosponsored by Carnegie Mellon School of Art.

Links: Haegue Yang web site; Article on Haegue Yang by Emily Pethick in Frieze Magazine

Watch more video interviews in the Audio/Video Library.

Born: 1960, London, England
Lives and Works: Glasgow, Scotland

With an acute understanding of form, architecture, and color, Richard Wright paints ephemeral wall drawings that call attention to overlooked parts of our built environment while subtly altering the viewer's experience of space. Wright's primary manner of working consists of installations or interventions, often placed in unconventional or marginalized spaces of a site—ceilings, cornices, windowpanes, or the edges of a wall. Using simply a brush and paint, the artist creates his wall drawings on site in a time-consuming and laborious process. The results are improvisational yet precise paintings with designs ranging from organic, tattoo-like forms to geometric line drawings to cosmological sunbursts or constellations. Wright's work is temporary by nature, as the artist insists that each of his wall drawings must be painted over at the end of an exhibition. He thus asserts the importance of erasure as a natural part of creativity and the possibility for quiet marks on a wall to change our perception of everything around them.

Links: Richard Wright at the Modern Institute

Watch more video interviews in the Video/Audio Library.

Born: 1977, Sukhumi, Georgia
Lives and Works: Zürich, Switzerland

Andro Wekua's emotionally demanding paintings, drawings, prints, collages, films, and imposing sculptural tableaux deal with myth and a claustrophobic seclusion. The denial of vision is a leitmotif of the uncanny life-size cast figures that populate his art—their eyes appear to have been smothered with paste, put out with pokers, or disguised with theatrical masks. In Get out of my room (2006), this lack of sight affects the cast figure of a schoolboy dressed in a shirt and black lace-up shoes. Wekua pointedly resists exoticizing narratives of loss, trauma, turmoil, and displacement that might easily be attributed to his artwork, because as a child, he was forced to flee the violence of the war-torn former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Memory, instead, is assumed to be no more authentic, or no less artificial, than the silver-screen-star portraits that wend their way into his collages or the classical or Freudian symbolism that his sculptures might animate.

Links:
Article about Andro Wekua by Daniel Baumann at FlashArtonline.com
Black and White's John Eastman interviews Andro Wekua

Born: 1970, Bangkok, Thailand
Lives and Works: Bangkok

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is the foremost independent experimental filmmaker to have emerged from Thailand. His beguiling films and installations draw on Thai society's deep-rooted reverence for the realm of the supernatural, Buddhist themes of previous and future incarnations, and popular soap operas. Time is frequently rendered fluid and layered, and apparently ordinary episodes slide into slumberous "Once upon a time..." folktales. Weerasethakul's works are often haunted by mirroring, splitting, and doubling—both structurally and through rhymed images and transformations. In Weerasethakul's world, linear narrative is usurped by ambience, and his characteristic use of extended takes and sumptuous tracking shots suggests a meditative approach to cinematic consciousness. He conjures an intensely personal spell of truth and fiction. The four-screen installation Unknown Forces (2007) functions as an indirect account of Thailand's shifting demographics and work practices. Consisting mostly of a static shot of the back of a sun-baked pickup truck as it carries a group of nomadic laborers, it gives voice to a "voiceless" workforce through storytelling, humor, and dance.

Links: Apichatpong Weersethakul on Internet Movie Database (IMDb); Apichatpong Weersethakul exhibition at REDCAT; Apichatpong Weersethakul at Kick the Machine; Apichatpong Weersethakul film series at Harvard Film Archives

Born: 1952, Schwerte, Germany
Lives and Works: Cologne, Germany

Rosemarie Trockel's eclectic range of media and techniques encompasses ceramics, knitted-wool "paintings" and clothing, films and videos, sculptural objects, photographs, and collages, in the process of interrogating cultural tropes relating to notions of gender, domesticity, the body, and humans' relationship to animals. She frequently alludes to domestication in her work, as evident in her ceramic sculptures, clothing, kitchen iconography, and houses for domesticated animals. These works suggest an ambivalent relationship to perceived "feminine myths" as well as an active resistance to the traditionally male-dominated German art world from which she has emerged. Trockel's recent ceramic sculptures include platinum-plated wall reliefs and floor pieces. landscapian shroud of my mother (2008), a low platform of glazed ceramic and steel evocative of a white cityscape or architectural model is punctuated by a black shroud. The work presents an abstracted, disconcerting image of a flattened human form. Here the body has evaporated and merged into the landscape, leaving only a piece of cloth as evidence of an earlier incarnation.

Links: Rosemarie Trockel, Life in Film, in Frieze Magazine

Born: 1968, Remscheid, Germany
Lives and Works: London and Berlin

In 1992 Wolfgang Tillmans made a self-conscious decision to "avoid the language of importance," as he put it—and a liminal, ephemeral, and transitory sensibility has characterized his use of photography ever since. Several overlapping bodies of works constitute a reservoir of judiciously considered and strikingly immediate pictures that the artist edits and orchestrates. From postcard-size to human proportions, his communities of images always populate an exhibition wall or tabletop in a way that suggests a set of relationships or a public conversation. Whether depicting a rat disappearing down a drain, a sock drying on a radiator, a lightning strike, an armpit, a bunch of keys, or a seated friend, Tillman's images seem to selectively expose irresistible photographic truths about their subjects with refinement and precision. His photographs are sometimes framed to take on a sculptural presence, but more often they are unprotected inkjet printouts that hang straightforwardly from pins, binder clips, or pieces of tape. This mode of presentation complements their subjects, who similarly often seem somewhat naked and vulnerable.

Links: Wolfgang Tillmans web site; Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at Hammer Museum; Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at Hirschhorn Museum

Born: 1933, Brooklyn, New York
Died: 1988, New York City

Paul Thek began his career in the 1960s as a painter. During the following decade, he turned to sculpture and installation art, but painting remained a consistent part of his art making, He often used the contained format of pages appropriated from the daily newspaper as the background for witty, semiabstract, and oddly beautiful compositions. Works such as 2 Birds and Dinosaur (Unfinished), both from 1975, are poignantly beautiful with their simple gestures and brightly colored surfaces. Similarly, as an installation artist, he preferred to construct his intricate "processions" from quotidian materials, such as newspapers, crates, branches, sand, inexpensive cloth, and cast-wax objects. These visually lush environments created from ephemeral materials express a profound sensibility to the passage of time. Thek also left behind notebooks filled with his alternately lucid, poetic, and manic scribbling. Viewed together these writings compose a portrait of an individual whose conflicted views on religion, sexuality, and identity informed some of the most poignant, innovative, and heterogeneous artworks of our time, even as they posed an insurmountable burden to his very existence.

Links: The Paul Thek Project; Review of Paul Thek exhibition at Mai 36 Galerie; Paul Thek exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe

Born: 1970, Ottweiler, Germany
Lives and Works: Berlin

In her sculptural installations and works on paper, Katja Strunz transforms found and humble materials—scrap metal, wood, and old pages or photographs from books—into playful, fantastical, and somewhat mysterious landscapes. Her works posit an intuitive and abstract language as they imbue the gallery space with intimations of memory or past phenomenona, paradoxically communicating both delicacy and aggression. She meticulously places the various forms in her installations to create constellations whose parts seem to be in direct communication with one another. Here Mirrors against identity (2008), an overlapping triangular structure, juts from the wall into the viewer's space; its sharp-edged steel forms suggesting an ominous presence. In A drop in time (five minutes later) (2008), a cluster of triangular shapes angle downward like a moth spiraling to the ground. The impact of Strunz's work registers through the sheer physicality of the objects and their carefully orchestrated relationships.

Born: 1956, Merano, Italy
Lives and Works: New York City

Rudolf Stingel is renowned for cavalierly dazzling canvases and riotously garish carpet installations as well as several recent melancholic self-portraits that seem to indicate a more introspective, or at least less exuberantly colorful, direction for his twenty-year career. From his New York debut in which he simply fitted a gallery with an excruciatingly orange carpet to the red-on-red brocaded surfaces he has often employed on canvases or walls—Stingel maintains a wry attitude in his artmaking, whereby the stunning visual effects belie the casually "vulgar" ease with which they wield their seductive powers. The visual sorcery typical of his paintings from the late 1980s, for example—gorgeous polychromatic panels that might be taken for luxurious crushed velvet—was deliberately shown to be merely the result of a banal procedure, as the artist produced what was effectively a "make your own Stingel" guide (Instructions, 1989). Here in Untitled (2008), visual illusion and sumptuous surface seem to equally dominate the expanses of two canvases, as gold-on-gold patterned planes appear to recede into the distance.

Links: Rudolf Stingel in the 2006 Whitney Biennial

Born: 1968, Los Angeles, California
Lives and Works: Los Angeles

Paul Sietsema is a sculptor of space whose "objects" are meditations on the ambiguity of vision and perception. He works primarily in film and sculpture—although he also makes collages, drawings, photographs, and books—fluctuating between three-dimensional objects and flat, moving images, between history and the present. Through these media, he consistently explores various combinations of form, texture, color, space, and movement, with subjects that span a broad geographic and temporal range. In his most recent project, Figure 3 (2008) Sietsema takes indigenous ethnographic objects found in various locations, including the South Pacific region of Oceania prior to European colonization, and remakes them as sculptures that he then films. For the artist, building these sculptural investigations reflects his interest in immersing himself in the same ideas of cultural production and consumption that his work interrogates as well as in severing the objects from their historical associations.

Born: 1968, Macclesfield, England
Lives and Works: Glasgow, Scotland

With a deliberately naive style and an intellectually dark sense of humor verging on the absurd, David Shrigley makes drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that collectively illustrate a scathing commentary on the various artistic, social, and political states of humanity. Almost without exception, his works are hilarious, cynical, and sharply intelligent, covering topics that range from music, art, politics, and health care to religion, sexuality, and life and death. Beneath the flamboyant irony and self-deprecating humor lies an undercurrent of vulnerability that lends many of Shrigley's illustrations and objects a bracing poignancy and reveals intimate notions of individual and collective identities. Here Shrigley converts the museum's Treasure Room into a modern day cabinet of curiosities. Here in I'm Dead (2007) a taxidermied kitten stands sentry with a wooden sign indicating his deceased status—an absurdly ironic yet tender work bordering on the grotesque. The artist has also painted a bright green text mural at the end of a long corridor that wittily commands the attention of any one who approaches.

Links: David Shrigley interviewed by Gavin MacDonald on Typocrat; David Shrigley on Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Born: 1977, Bangalore, India
Lives and Works: Bangalore

With a precisely tuned sense of the symbolic and sacred potential in both organic and man-made materials, Ranjani Shettar makes art that functions within a broad dynamic of metaphysics and aesthetics. Her work draws inspiration from beliefs embedded in Indian culture and traditions, and entreats physical objects to be interlocutors with spiritual and intangible dimensions, a feature common to many religious and magical rites. Yet the substances the artist has employed are rarely emotive or precious. She often incorporates coconut fibers, resin, mud, cotton, plastic, terra-cotta, wax, twine, and metal in her work. There is an acknowledged resonance in Shettar's art with the high-tech economic growth that is taking place in her home city of Bangalore, a leading force in the burgeoning IT and Internet sector. In light of Shettar's engagement with spiritual connectedness and highly skilled craft, the global networks and dexterous labor of new technology offer a more secular paradigm for considering the consciousness of her art. Her work often demands a sensory and emotive response, and it frequently presents us with joyous compositions that appear to conflate biomorphic forms and scales as in Just a Bit More (2006), a delicate room-sized web of thread and hand-molded beeswax.

Links: Black and White's John Eastman interviews Ranjani Shettar

Born: 1954, Oldenburg, Germany
Lives and Works: Düsseldorf, Germany

In his architectural models, figurative-inspired sculptures, and works on paper, Thomas Schütte uses distinctly un-monumental and anti-heroic gestures to examine formal artistic issues of scale, color, and dimensionality as well as to interrogate fundamental concerns of humankind. His work explores the role of the human subject, along with its limits and possibilities, through a nontraditional and expressive brand of figuration. Perhaps the best-known examples of his imaginative reinterpretation of the human figure are his Grosse Geister (Big spirits), large, amorphous, twisting characters cast in aluminum, bronze, or steel. From these ongoing explorations, the Zombies have evolved as fragmented sculptural piles of appendages, torsos, and heads taken from the Grosse Geister forms. Indebted to classical sculpture, Schütte's "figurative" heaps could perhaps be read as the artist's tragicomic interpretation of the human condition. Likewise his delicate watercolor paintings depict far more than their titles suggest. In Apple 5 (2007), for example, the sliced half of an apple lies near a grimacing stick-figure formally upending the objects' relative scale while imbuing the scene with unresolved allegorical intimations.

Links: Thomas Schütte on web

Born: 1972, Tarnow, Poland
Lives and Works: Tarnow

Working primarily as a painter and filmmaker, Wilhelm Sasnal brings to his art an underlying skepticism about the authenticity of visual culture and the process of seeing. As the works on view demonstrate, Sasnal deliberately employs many styles (graphic, abstract, expressive, minimalist), as well as a range of sources (photographs, the Internet, television, magazines, comic books, and other media) and subjects (portraits, landscapes, architecture, cartoons, and everyday objects). In D. Johnston (2007) for example, the artist depicts Daniel Johnston, an eccentric artist and musician who suffers from mental illness, in dramatic light and shadow. The strangeness of Johnston's character is manifest in his hands, which seem to blend into the piano, while his body takes on a ghostly appearance. In the landscape Untitled (2008), Sasnal subverts the traditional romantic vista of a dark sunset (or moon rising) over water by placing the orb below the horizon line.

Links: Wilhelm Sasnal at Saatchi Gallery online

Born: 1971, Saitama, Japan
Lives and Works: Berlin

Noguchi Rika creates photographs of our planet that seem suspended in states of tranquil immersion. She often seeks out locations that speak of the limits of human knowledge and ambition. For her series New Land (1999-2000), for example, the artist documented the construction of artificial islands off the coast of the Netherlands; the group of photographs known as Rocket Hill (begun in 2001) record the facilities and launch pad of Japan's Tanegashima Space Center and its island setting. Although some of her photographs have featured human beings as their principal subjects, human figures are usually remote, incidental, or entirely absent from her "fieldwork." The series The Sun (begun in 2005) on view here is an earth-based exploration of a celestial body—our nearest and most familiar star—resulting from something that is beyond usual or sensible experience. The bursting coronas and incandescent flare-ups recorded in these images are the result of shooting directly into the sun using the most primitive type of lens-less device for capturing images—a pinhole camera.

Links: Noguchi Rika in the Guggenheim Collection; Noguchi Rika web site

Born: 1965, Glasgow, Scotland
Lives and Works: Berlin

At the heart of Susan Philipsz's ephemeral installations lie the infinite possibilities of sound to sculpt both the physical experience of space and the intangible recollections of memories. She records her own voice singing a cappella renditions of appropriated music and then projects the recordings in particular locations, imperceptibly transforming viewers' understanding of the architectural setting and magnifying their perception of the passage of time. Sunset Song (2003) consists of two recordings of "The Banks of the Ohio," an American folk song (based on a river originating in Pittsburgh) whose haunting lyrics relate a tale in which a spurned man drowns the object of his unrequited affections. With Philipsz singing both the male and female perspectives, the sound--powered by solar panels and projected here in the museum's Sculpture Courtyard--fades with the setting sun. In One and the Same (2008), created for this exhibition, Philipsz sings three overlapping renditions of a medieval ballad relating the story of a woman lured away from her husband and child by a returning lover. This installation can be heard in the Music Hall.

Watch more video interviews in the Video/Audio Library.

Born: 1963, Hildesheim, Germany
Lives and Works: Berlin

Manfred Pernice recycles humble construction materials, such as particleboard, concrete, steel, and cardboard, from the built environment and reconfigures them into open-ended sculptural propositions. His cylindrical sculptures or self-described "cans" and rough-edged movable containers, for example, evoke abstracted interpretations of furniture or buildings stripped of their function. Pernice's objects and installations, as in "deja vue 12" (2008), suggest invented architectonic forms yet retain traces of their past use or associations. Conceptually, his objects refer to neutral, commodified, and often overlooked sites from our surroundings: spaces through which people pass, transport containers, and places of rest or transition, Sited in a nontraditional and public location--under a museum staircase--and exhibiting the artist's characteristic architecturally "raw" aesthetic, the installation poses a series of indecipherable but provocative questions concerning history, time, and space.

Links: Review of Manfred Pernice exhibition at Anton Kern

Born: 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Lives and Works: Belo Horizonte

Rivane Neuenschwander's art has the precisely orchestrated, unforced economy of what she has termed "ethereal materialism" and frequently involves modest materials. Often apparent is her fascination with serendipity and the agency of living systems, such as garden snails that munch away at rice-paper squares or ants that orchestrate a parade of confetti dots. The activation of sensory memory and trusting the realization of her work to the generosity of other people or nonhuman organisms frequently sparks Neuschwander's work to life. In I Wish Your Wish, the artist invites viewers to select a ribbon imprinted with a wish and leave behind a wish of their own. The ribbon can be tied to the wrist and worn until it falls off at which point the wish may be realized. The video Pangaea (2008) takes its title from the vast land mass that existed on earth about 250 million years ago, before this "supercontinent" broke apart into the land masses we know today. Neuenschwander used a stop-frame animation technique to record hundreds of ants as they crawled over and ate a plate of carpaccio meat, giving the viewer the sense that these tiny insects are moving and shaping an evolving map of the world.

Links: Rivane Neuenschwander at Walker Art Center; Review of Rivane Neuenschwander exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar

Born: 1972, Eureka, California
Lives and Works: Los Angeles

At the root of Matthew Monahan's sculptures and drawings are physical attributes common to all humans: the face and the body itself. He draws on our investment in the function and form of things that we habitually have made to resemble ourselves--whether dolls and puppets, effigies and totems, statues and figurines, busts, masks, and other prostheses or those objects into which bodies may have transformed, such as relics, trophies, and mummies. Composed and "decomposed" from a wide variety of materials, particularly carved floral foam and beeswax, the body as it emerges from Monahan's direct sculptural process is rarely a complete entity. Torsos, heads, and limbs are repeatedly broken or punctured as if the sculptures were made up of ransacked icons, and his charcoal drawings of faces are typically torn or crumpled into three dimensional forms. Plinths, pedestals, and the transparent structures that often integrate or encase these grotesque bodies are characteristically incomplete and further lend Monahan's work the dual sense that museological piety and violent iconoclasm have both been set loose.

Watch more video interviews in the Video/Audio Library.

Born: 1931, Turin, Italy
Lives and Works: Turin

Marisa Merz's sculptures explore the phenomenological boundaries between form and formlessness, between interior and exterior states of being. For nearly forty years, she has created handmade sculptures, installations, drawings, and performances that quietly and intimately embrace the dichotomy between the mystical and tangible elements of our existence. Her literal use of such substances as wax, clay, salt, yarn, and various metals (copper, steel, aluminum, gold) as well as a range of found objects that includes twigs, furniture, knitting needles, and blankets places the notion of materiality at the center of her work. From 1965 to 1966, in the Turin home she shared with her husband and fellow artist, Mario Merz, the artist made Untitled (Living Sculpture). This suspended, spectacular arrangement of twisting, tubular slabs of aluminum extends aggressively into the viewer's space. Evocative of an underwater cornucopia of shiny mollusk shells and jellyfish tendrils, the sculpture has been described as a "primordial entanglement."

Born: 1925, Milan, Italy
Died: 2003, Turin, Italy

Mario Merz's art encapsulates a hostility to the technological, the rational, and the mass-produced. In this respect, his work shares many of the preoccupations of Arte Povera—literally "poor art"—a term coined to describe the work of Merz, his wife, Marisa, and a loosely associated group of their contemporaries working in the vibrant milieu of the Italian art scene of the late 1960s. At the core of Merz's practice is his use of the infinite mathematical sequence known as the Fibonacci series, which results when two consecutive numbers are added together to generate the next: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. The Fibonacci number sequences—manifested in natural processes and shell and plant forms—were for Merz emblematic of the vitality of organic creation. The artist's characteristic use of rudimentary materials in his sculpture suggests a scavenging, ritualized, and provisional form of art making. In A Mallarmé, he uses neon and newspapers in a sculptural evocation of the French poet Stephane Mallarmé's words, "A roll of the dice will never abolish chance" (1897) and to elicit the tension between certainty and the chaotic flow of world events.

Links: Mario Merz's obituary in guardian.co.uk; Mario Merz's obituary in New York Times

Born: 1966, San Francisco, California
Lives and Works: San Francisco

Reflecting punk, outsider, and folk art sensibilities, Barry McGee's playfully anarchic multimedia installations combine detritus from urban culture with the considered techniques of formal artmaking. His work generates an ambivalent dialogue between the spontaneous and uncontrolled atmosphere of street art and the mediated "white cube" of the contemporary art gallery. Found, discarded, and recycled objects, motorized figures, audio components, and video monitors exist alongside portraits, text, assemblages of framed photographs and drawings, and sections of geometric optical color-field "wallpaper." McGee's installations often include his trademark images of morose, droopy, caricatured faces inspired by the transient and homeless population of San Francisco. These images form a poignant—if fleeting—commentary on the overlooked status of outsiders within a community. The temporality of his visual language and the immediacy of its communication convey a history that is continually written, erased, and written again.

Links: Barry McGee on Art:21 - Art in the Twenty-First Century; Black and White's John Eastman interviews Barry McGee

Watch more video interviews in the Video/Audio Library.

Born: 1968, Volkel, The Netherlands
Lives and Works: Arnhem, NL, and Ronse, Belgium

Since 1986, Mark Manders has been engaged in an ongoing project he refers to as "Self-Portrait as a Building," mapping his artistic persona through site-specific renegotiations of physical materials in space. Taking the shape of sculptures, installations, and drawings, these subtle rearrangements of existing and invented forms fuse specific and seemingly incongruous elements--figures, animals, archaeological fragments, everyday objects, and architectural components--into a new visual language. Room with Clothes, Belt and Contact Lenses (1992-2008) is the title of a sculptural installation consisting of multiple works. In the largest work, Continuous Livingroom Scene (2007-2008), two figures appear split down the middle and arranged with wooden beams and plates, while a third, abstracted figurative "fragment" is discernible only by its mop of hair. Chair (2003) is a "found" object as its title suggests, while Assignment (2008) is an odd accumulation of the artist's clothes, shoes, contact lenses, and money. Also on view Fox/Mouse/Belt (1992) is a poignant floor sculpture of two incongruous beings arrested mid-leap. Bound together by a leather belt and placed on the floor, the animals are frozen in an indeterminable moment in time. Within each object and from one installation to the next, Manders expresses the potential for symbiotic relationships between disconnected or opposing parts.

Links: Mark Manders web site; Review of Mark Manders exhibition at Baltic

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Born: 1964, Norwood, Massachusetts
Lives and Works: Los Angeles

Blending rigorous aesthetic concerns with an anthropologist's sensibility to community engagement and observation, Sharon Lockhart uses film and photography to create poignant, beautiful, and intimate portraits. She carefully manipulates formal elements as she explores certain concepts with regularity: portraiture, the relationship between photography and film, and the combination of fictive or choreographed performances with unscripted, intimate moments. The film Pine Flat and the accompanying color photographs Pine Flat Portrait Studio (both from 2005) present a spare, meditative series of filmic and photographic portraits of a group of children the artist came to know during her nearly four-year stay in Pine Flat, California. Pine Flat is a two-part film focusing on children and adolescents interacting in the sublime landscape surrounding this small rural community. Its determinedly languid pace engages the viewer in a self-conscious reflection on the process of looking and offers a meditation on the subjective experience of time, particularly as an aspect of children's lives.

Film Screenings of Pine Flat daily at 2:00 p.m. and Thursday evenings at 5:00 p.m., Carnegie Museum of Art Theater. Pine Flat will screen on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 3:10 p.m. and Thursday at 5:00 p.m. during the week of 7.21.08 - 7.26.08. Schedule subject to change.

Watch more video interviews in the Video/Audio Library.

Born: 1919, Carinthia, Austria
Lives and Works: Vienna, Austria

Maria Lassnig considers all of her paintings to be self-portraits, even those that do not appear to depict her or any human figure for that matter. Each of her subjects derives from a process that the artist terms "body awareness." She has no use for external or anatomical views of her body, least of all photographic representations. "I want to be as independent as possible of machines and complicated tools," she has insisted. "Pencil and brush are primeval tools. Painting is a primeval art." Lassnig bases her work on the frequently distressing internal sensations of inhabiting her own body, both physiologically and psychologically. Her human forms are often defective and supported by crutches, their parts dysmorphic, tortured, or ungainly. For the artist, painting is a means to confront perceptions that are uncomfortable and embarrassing, while her use of color also appears to inflict states of immediate anguish, stress, or exhaustion. Brutal soccer matches, the subject of several of the artist's recent works, depict goalkeepers flailing in front of the net and players forcing each other off the ball or lurching with studded boots. In Lassnig's paintings such lawless contests seem to imply that winning carries an urgent moral imperative and losing has potentially mortal results.