Euan Macdonald
09 Apr - 12 Jun 2011
EUAN MACDONALD
9,000 PIECES
9 April – 12 June, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO,Calif. (April 8, 2011) – For the ninth exhibition in its PAUSE: Practice and Exchange program series, YBCA presents Los Angeles-based artist Euan Macdonald’s 9,000 Pieces. The show includes four new works investigating globalization, perception, and temporality through a single object, the piano. Macdonald’s 9,000 Pieces will be the former San Francisco resident’s first Bay Area show since exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other local galleries in the early to mid-2000s.
Macdonald is best known for video works which often capture everyday, fleeting moments that challenge viewers’ expectations of seemingly familiar situations. The artist also maintains an ongoing interest in sound, referencing sheet music and other instruments in his explorations of visual and audio indeterminacy.
The show’s title video work, 9,000 Pieces, portrays the durability testing of a piano at a musical instrument factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, China. During the course of the nine-minute video, the piano’s 9,000 parts are tested for a lifetime of use by machines as a clock records the passing of a single minute. As with some of his early videos, 9,000 Pieces highlights questions about the sustainability and speed of fast changing economies and globalized societies.
“Macdonald quietly unsettles the viewer’s faith about what exactly is - or is not - happening in the pictures he or she is looking at. 9,000 Pieces engineers a similar, though more elaborate, uncertainty,” said curator Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, in the catalog essay “Responsiveness Testing.”
Other new works include: Shades, a series of six large graphite drawings of pianos that explore class, historical, and social associations; Out of the Wild, a two-channel video work on the use of two tuning forks; and Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, a silkscreen series based on text from poet/writer Charles Bukowski’s 1979 book of the same name.
YBCA has also published a 130-page artist book of drawings and experimental, documentary-style photographs of the Shanghai factory’s assembly line and machinery, designed by Willem Henri and with an essay by Rugoff.
Public programs around this new work include a lecture on the history of the keyboard by Chris Brown of Mills College, followed by a live piano and electronic music performance; an Alternative Artist Lecture by Macdonald, during which he will discuss his influences beyond the art world; and a live DJ mix of piano and electronic music by Bay Area performance artists Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker.
9,000 PIECES
9 April – 12 June, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO,Calif. (April 8, 2011) – For the ninth exhibition in its PAUSE: Practice and Exchange program series, YBCA presents Los Angeles-based artist Euan Macdonald’s 9,000 Pieces. The show includes four new works investigating globalization, perception, and temporality through a single object, the piano. Macdonald’s 9,000 Pieces will be the former San Francisco resident’s first Bay Area show since exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other local galleries in the early to mid-2000s.
Macdonald is best known for video works which often capture everyday, fleeting moments that challenge viewers’ expectations of seemingly familiar situations. The artist also maintains an ongoing interest in sound, referencing sheet music and other instruments in his explorations of visual and audio indeterminacy.
The show’s title video work, 9,000 Pieces, portrays the durability testing of a piano at a musical instrument factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, China. During the course of the nine-minute video, the piano’s 9,000 parts are tested for a lifetime of use by machines as a clock records the passing of a single minute. As with some of his early videos, 9,000 Pieces highlights questions about the sustainability and speed of fast changing economies and globalized societies.
“Macdonald quietly unsettles the viewer’s faith about what exactly is - or is not - happening in the pictures he or she is looking at. 9,000 Pieces engineers a similar, though more elaborate, uncertainty,” said curator Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, in the catalog essay “Responsiveness Testing.”
Other new works include: Shades, a series of six large graphite drawings of pianos that explore class, historical, and social associations; Out of the Wild, a two-channel video work on the use of two tuning forks; and Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, a silkscreen series based on text from poet/writer Charles Bukowski’s 1979 book of the same name.
YBCA has also published a 130-page artist book of drawings and experimental, documentary-style photographs of the Shanghai factory’s assembly line and machinery, designed by Willem Henri and with an essay by Rugoff.
Public programs around this new work include a lecture on the history of the keyboard by Chris Brown of Mills College, followed by a live piano and electronic music performance; an Alternative Artist Lecture by Macdonald, during which he will discuss his influences beyond the art world; and a live DJ mix of piano and electronic music by Bay Area performance artists Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker.