Jamie Zigelbaum
No There There
January 24
through February 21, 2015
TRANSFER is pleased to present Jamie Zigelbaum’s ‘NO THERE THERE,’ the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first solo presentation in the USA.
“NO THERE THERE” is an exhibition of new work from Brooklyn-based artist Jamie Zigelbaum that explores the materiality of the digital image. This exhibition begins with two of the artist’s earlier works ‘Pixel’ and ‘Six-Forty by Four-Eighty’ but moves beyond Zigelbaum’s interest in the “recontextualization of the pixel” to question the role of the screen itself — moving images are programmatically constructed and displayed in unconventional formats, hardware is sliced and exposed, and interactive artworks engage the viewer in reconsidering the false dichotomy of the natural and the digital.
Upon entering “NO THERE THERE” the viewer confronts a large-format installation on a six-foot screen. Zigelbaum’s ‘100 Hours per Minute’ is an algorithmically generated, video-based work that extends across the public space of the web and the institutional space of the gallery. Gallery patrons input search terms via public tweets with unique hashtags (accessible only from the installed piece) to programmatically generate ‘averages’ of YouTube videos that match their query. Each act of viewership is archived within the piece, and also visible online, as the videos are uploaded back to YouTube and available in the public space of the web in real time.
In the center of the exhibition sits Zigelbaum’s ‘My Television’. The artist waterjet sliced his own TV into 40 square pieces and cast them in clear resin to produce this sculptural object. Zigelbaum explains “The cutting of the television like this highlights the irreality of the images I viewed on it.” Extending this inquiry into the moving image object, on another wall flicker twenty, small LCD screens running on a network of Raspberry Pi’s. The grid of ‘Sequence in Parallel’ displays a selection of Zigelbaum’s favorite films, each one evenly divided into twenty, looping segments that play simultaneously across the screens, allowing a viewer to glimpse the entire film object as a whole.
On January 24th, visitors are invited to TRANSFER from 7–11PM for the debut of this new body of work. The exhibition runs through February 21st, 2015 – public hours are 2-6PM on Saturdays and appointments are available to view the exhibition anytime by tweeting @transfergallery or writing to the director@transfergallery.com.
Jamie Zigelbaum employs light, computation, and industrial design to create sensate, interactive sculptures in order to understand the relationship between information structures and the human organism. Informed by current work in physics, media theory, computer science, and philosophy, his digitally-imbued, physical objects explore how the contemporary experience of communication refigures the body and repositions the boundaries of identity.
In 2013, Andrew Blum wrote in the New York Times Magazine that Jamie is part of “A new generation of visionaries [who] are using next-level technologies to create products, projects and experiences that test the limits of design—and our imaginations.” Later that year, his work Pixel debuted and sold at Paddles ON!, the first digital art auction at Phillips, curated by Lindsay Howard. Additional exhibitions include Riflemaker Gallery, Design Miami/, The Corcoran Gallery, Johnson Trading Gallery, Ars Electronica, Saint-Etienne International Design Biennial, and The Creators Project. His work can be found in private collections, including the Frankel Foundation for Art, the Rothschild Collection, the MIT Media Lab, The Tech Museum of Innovation, and at Tumblr.
Jamie Zigelbaum was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1978. He received a BS in Human-Computer Interaction from Tufts University in 2006, a Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab in 2008, and was the recipient of the 2010 Designer of the Future Award from Design Miami/. Jamie lives and works in New York.