Marc Ganzglass: Open Studio
On Thursday, October 7, 2010 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM, the Chinati Foundation will host an opening and reception for Artist in Residence Marc Ganzglass. The artist’s two-part exhibition, Transmission Tower Time, will occupy the Locker Plant and the Ice Plant on East Oak Street. Both exhibition spaces will also be open to the public on Saturday and Sunday October 9-10 from 10:00 to 3:00 PM.
Transmission Tower Time will include work completed during Ganzglass’s residency in Marfa. At the Locker Plant, three videos will be shown in the building’s back rooms. As visitors enter, their first impression will be of a wall, or wave, of sound, as the audio tracks overlap. The first video, created using high-speed film footage from an experiment at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen captures the creation, in a flask of pure water rhythmically buffeted by sound waves, of a single photon (or “point”) of light. The jerky footage recording this tiny, epochal creation, this micro-Big Bang, is like a home movie made of light by light. The second video depicts a cruder, if time-honored, experiment: the attempt by a pair of people to locate buried electricity lines using metal dowsers or divining rods. The third video, filmed in Marfa, shows a freight train passing in the background, while in the foreground rests a sleek industrial object whose purpose or function is difficult to tell—a section of a modern windmill, bound for a wind farm.
Installed in the Locker Plant’s front room will be an object that is at once a ubiquitous and invisible part of the contemporary landscape: a full-scale transmission tower built from scratch by the artist, in two pieces and lying on its side. The recumbent tower offers the chance to peruse—”live,” as it were—another apparatus for the circulation of energy of the sort employed or depicted in the videos. Adjacent to the tower is a wholly different kind of vehicle for the application of energy from point to point, a ri?e range.
The works at the Locker Plant, each in their own way, will posit, present, and puzzle over the elements–the elementals–of transmission, of energy on the move. Ganzglass offers an alternate way of considering these mysteries down the street at the Ice Plant. On view there will be The Copenhagen Interpretation, a new iteration of a work produced last year in Denmark, about our fundamental inability to describe these quantum events.
Marc Ganzglass received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1999. Recent solo exhibitions include Middle Sized Aggregates at Martos Gallery in New York (2010); Dødsønske at Bastard, Oslo and Vol d’Orgeuil with OEen Group, Copenhagen (both 2009); and Liu Thinks Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is Innocent., Parkers Box, Brooklyn (2008). He currently lives and works in New York.