**KNOWLEDGE BASE**
November 21, 2009 to January 2, 2010
Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas
Mary Beth Edelson (New York), Molly Gochman (Houston), Amy Granat (New York), Marina Rosenfeld (New York), Mai Ueda (New York), Ultra Violet (New York)
Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis
Knowledge Base offers propositions about knowledge that are out of the ordinary and go beyond the immediately visible: invented rituals and innovative representations of mental states ranging from hidden family histories to abstracted intimate relational notions. Such subliminal information symbolically overwrites the works on display. Some of the works intentionally revisit and distort truths that seem to be inherent in our historical experience, thus conceptually transgressing predominant social norms.
Knowledge Base explored ideas of knowledge and power represented in unconventional ways. It began as a reflection on artistically formatted rituals and spiritualist situations and developed into a search for works that employ a variety of elusive media while remaining rooted in spiritual experience. This includes transmuted sound and various visualizations of esoteric memories in re-cycled images or “disappearing” films.
The project includes six renowned artists of different generations:
Mary Beth Edelson’s work is rooted in feminism, political activism, collaboration, and public participation. A feminist, her work focuses on a female-centered spirituality based on Jungian archetypes. In 1977, Edelson traveled to a cave in Hvar Island, Yugoslavia, where she began her ritual performances. Three years later, she returned to painting and now lives in New York. She has been featured in over thirty art books and her work is widely exhibited and critiqued in the U.S. and abroad in the diverse literature of psychology, women’s studies, feminist theory, photography, theology and art. Edelson’s art has been collected by numerous museums, including the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Corcoran Gallery and the Walker Art Center.
Amy Granat was born in Saint Louis, Missouri. She is a filmmaker and multi-media artist who has exhibited at such venues as the Swiss Institute, White Columns and PS1. She took part in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is a co-founder of Cinema Zero, a collective that that fosters collaborations between artists across different media.
Molly Gochman works with installation, video, performance, and photography. Several galleries in Houston have presented her work, including DiverseWorks, Margolis Gallery, and her own space, Commune. Gochman debuted internationally in 2005 at the Sara Roney Gallery in Sydney, Australia. Since then she has been artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and at Elsewhere in North Carolina. In 2007 she was invited to the Lincoln Center to introduce Waterfalls Wept, a 15-foot sculpture later installed at one of Chashama’s Manhattan locations.
Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of large-scale performance works comprising installation, video projection, photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts: the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Artists’ Space in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in Los Angeles and Contemporary Exhibitions, a public art project for Creative Time. She has exhibited in galleries such as Curt Marcus, Greene Naftali, Rosamund Felsen or Deitch Projects, and participated in festivals including Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, Steirische Herbst, in Graz, Austria, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Wein Modern and The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music.
Mai Ueda is a performance and multimedia artist. Shehas showed at the 2001 Lyon Biennale, Palais De Tokyo in Paris, PS1 in New York and Fargfabriken in Stockholm. ´Together with collaborators she used to run Electronic Orphanage in Los Angeles. She is a part of the art movement NEEN.
Ultra Violet was a central member of Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960s. Today she is a prominent and established avant-garde artist exhibiting throughout the world. She creates playful and intuitive works infused with energy, light, spirituality, symbolism, global meaning and humor. Ultra Violet’s paintings, 3-D constructions, mixed-media installations, and drawings reveal a visual universe filled with rainbows, angel, blue skies and white clouds, but they also contain material related to the chaos and destruction that challenges our 21st century world.