1996 Ajna 1, 2, and 3

(click photo to view images)
Ajna 3 (amber), about 12" tall, Stereolithography Resin, 1995-96

These three sculptures (Ājña 1, Ājña 2, and Ājña 3) have been exhibited widely, most recently in Fundamentally Human, curated by Suzanne Anker at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. One fits within the next. 

The wire frame prints are from the same period. The square's are 24" square, while the long pieces are 60"x30" both mounted archival prints. The other images are screen shots while the last sculpture is Ājña Spine 2.22, glass 19" tall.

2009 Model Behavior

(click photo to view images)
Model Behavior is an exhibition of sculpture and photographs. The ideas hinge on the word model. The first sense of this word is an ideal, an aspiration or an inspiration. At the same time to model something is to map it, make a simulation of it or to emulate it. To model something is to give it form, to reify it. Models are the first steps in the evolution of a product, they carry the original intent of a thing and lay out the constituent parts. 

Adding the word behavior emphasizes the ideal quality of the endeavor and creates an equivalency that is reiterated in the sculptures. The equivalency refers to the distance between a model (a concept) and a behavior (an action). For Rees this distance is a generative space where works begin to bifurcate formally and semantically. Through iteration and reiteration, these experiences take form upon the crystalline structure of hard matter. These options are contained within that material. They speak the different impulses and layers of a piece creating a valence of meanings. There is humor and conflict in this show: some of the works would never be considered an ideal of anything. They are play oriented puzzles, riddles of stability and instability. The work questions the stasis of these models and engages it through the fluidity of content as one considers works contrasted against each other. The act of making these works is like breathing or walking. They are basic, held close to automatic processes and to liminal space. 

To mine this mental to physical space and to extract from it potential and even ethical implications of action is to participate in mimetic culture. Making is a process that can be transferred through obects to others. It can open up possibilities potentials and meanings and it can play in the unwinding of human experience. For Rees, this takes place through the consonance and dissonance of the works in Model Behavior.

photo documents

catalogue for the exhibition

Press Release

interview with Thyrza Goodeve

2005 Putto 2x2x4

(click photo to view images)
Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art 2006

Images

facet852 from michael rees on Vimeo.

Video

PDF

more information:Kemper Museum

2012 Tactical Play Exchange Interview with Vanessa Saraceno

In Conversation: 
Vanessa Saraceno Interviews Michael Rees and Robert Gero

 Over the past year, Michael Rees and Robert Gero have created a series of artwork based on the strategical play of a particular gallery space and the hundreds of interactions it can produce. Tactical Play Exchange, their first collaborative project, was on view in New York at Pablo’s Birthday Gallery through May 5th. The show moved to Favorite Goods Gallery in Los Angeles, where it was reconfigured according to the new space on May 12th.

This constant-action project begins with the architectural elements constituting the exhibition space—modeled with 3D software in different times and places by the two artists. This to-and-fro movement between the two artists becomes a “networked ground of play” in which the physical quality of sculpture is transformed into an infinitely malleable architecture of relations. 

Read the Interview here

2006 Putto Series

Here is the animation from a 2006 installation from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art to realize Putto 2x2x4 as a large scale sculpture with animaiton.. The animation played on a 6'x9' stadium display next to an 18' sculpture.

facet852 from michael rees on Vimeo.

2012 Colliding Complexities

The Curator of Colliding Complexity [dnasab] produced an interview with each artist, posted them to youtube and pinned a qr tag to the wall next to each piece, which was awesome. They were highly edited and by the time he came to my studio [dnasab] told me that most of the artists said there wasn't a new aesthetic. I certainly did and remember saying that I thought what was being talked about as a new aesthetic was actually a style. I've read both bridle's essay and sterling's gust (among a half dozen other reactions) and find that in each case my mind wanders constantly off topic. It neither grips me nor inspires. I find the videos that [dnasab] has posted on you tube to be rich and interesting and chaotic. In this sporadic manner they veer wildly from one to the next subject sometimes striking into complex territories. A good friend lays deep vitriole on the NA. You be the judge...

and my contribution

2012 Colliding Complexities Friday September 21, 7-9pm

Opening Friday September 21, 2012
Group Show at Storefront Bushwick 
16 Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn 917 714 3813 

Panel Discussion @ Pratt Department of Digital Arts

October 2 6:30-8:30p 
Myrtle Hall, 
200 Willoughby Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11205

2009-10 social object: sculpture and software images

social object: sculpture and software

The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum presents
Social Object: sculpture and software by Michael Rees
12.17.09 - 01.23.10

Social Object: sculpture and software is an interactive software installation by Michael Rees that includes correlated physical objects with virtual objects. Interacting with artist authored software creates screen based experiences that construct virtual objects from which physical objects can be derived. The work explores the relationship between language and form and creates a framework for virtual and physical play. 

The exhibition includes the Sculptural User Interface (SUI) application, along with objects made from the SUI using contemporary automated sculpting processes. The SUI is a language to form synthesizer. The software generates 3D forms by typing letters on the keyboard. Many letters, words, sentences, turn into many kinds of shapes can be combined in multiple ways to create a rich user experience. 

The exhibition includes the software Sculptural User Interface, along with objects made from the software. The Sculptural User Interface is a language to form synthesizer. 

Social Object and The Sculptural User Interface are inspired by Joseph Beuys' ideas about Social Sculpture, Duchamp's ready mades recapitulated by Joseph Kosuth as the ready made made ready and how these relate to the open source software movement. 

A project 
by Michael Rees 
Produced by Don Guarnierri
with alphabets from 

Anj Ferrara, Geoff Flash, Glen Gentele, Randy Illum, Prem Mckeig, Sarah Menchise, Pablo Morillo, Adam Nowicki, Michael Rees,  Jack Rees, James Stewart, Alex Vicenzi, Ray Vikete, Matthew West,

This project is made possible by grants from the National Foundation for the Arts, the Creative Capital Foundation and the Tribeca Film Institute's Media Arts Fellowships. Special thanks to Koan Jeff Baysa, Chris Burnett, NIna Colosi,Donald Guarnierri, and Kristofer Schlachter. We also would like to thank Geoff Flash and Brian McDonald of Kinnelon High School, in Kinnelon, NJ. 

The Project Room for New Media and Performing Arts (theprojectroom.org) is an incubator of new ideas, showcasing groundbreaking concepts in all art mediums, and the intersection of the arts through technology. Initiated in 2003 at Chelsea Art Museum (chelseaatmuseum.org) by curator, Nina Colosi, over 350 international emerging and established artists have been presented in exhibitions, performing arts, symposiums, meet-the-artist programs, and workshops. The innovative public art project, Streaming Museum (streamingmuseum.org) was launched on January 29, 2008.

 Supported in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Chelsea Art Museum
556 West 22nd St.
212-255-0719
For more information please visit:

http://creative-capital.org/projects/view/273
http://mediaartists.org/content.php?sec=artist&sub=detail&artist_id=794

2009-10 social object: sculpture and software talk

Here are 8 segments on youtube.

Here's another short from the Chelsea Art Museum website. 

2001 Whitney Bitstreams Exhibition

Ajna Spine Series (White Album) at the Whitney Museum of American Art 2001

(dimensions variable. Sculptures 18x5x5", prints 60x30 lamdah print, works from 1995-2001. Sculptures made from Selective Laser Sintering polycarbonate)

2012 enigmatic response inverted (ernie kovacs)

Favorite Goods 936 1/2 Chung King Way, Los Angeles. 

Tactical Play Exchange

Gero and Rees

newsletter

06.2012 Tactical Play Exchange Favorite Goods Los Angeles

Favorite Goods 936 1/2 Chung King Way, Los Angeles. 

Tactical Play Exchange
Gero and Rees
newsletter

04.2012 Exhibition View (Pablo's Birthday)

Tactical Play Exchange
Gero and Rees
newsletter

1993 Studio Performance Photographs

newsletter

From the series Studio Performance 1993, First exhibited in Model Behavior, a show of sculpture and photographs in 2009 at Colton Farb Gallery, Houston, Texas.

1991 (303 exhibition)

These are some studio pictures of works from the first New York show and drawings. There were several reviews but I liked Roger Denson's best. (The polaroids are a retro feature.)

01.1980 Gun Sculpture

Gun Sculpture

January 1980

On the banks of the Kaw River near its entrance into the Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri.

http://g.co/maps/byc3c

Dimensions Pipe is 65" high, by 80' long

materials: steel, various guns and loads

temporary installation

notes

The Gun Sculpture opened  in a performance type event of about 35 people.  Everyone who wanted to was able to shoot a 12 gauge shotgun into the piece, listen as it rode down the pipe and then see the bullet splash out in the river. Later people would seek me out to experience the piece. We would typically get a small group together of about 5 or 6 people and drive to my house to get the gun. We would then drive to a gun store were mostly art types would walk in and buy shotgun shells through the stares of the counter personnel. (It was 1981 and there were gun stores easy to find) Sometimes people brought their own guns and bought shells for them. 

This was Kansas City in the early 1980's. The economy was destitute. We would take a long ride from my house through the city and then down and over the 12th street bridge. Circuitously we would drive the streets of the west bottoms to a small Levee Road that led to the banks of the Kaw river. You always wondered if the car would get stuck on the Levee: it had large ruts in it. People used this area to do various common and nefarious things: some fished; some camped; some would abandon animals, cars, trash and other. It was a liminal place at the edges of two cities, forgotten about in any official way. It was also an industrial intersection. I-70 Highway raced over head, two smaller bridges crossed the Kaw to Kansas City Kansas, and two railroad trellis made their way in two different directions. There was a sewage plant near by, a huge trucking depot too. For all intents it was abandoned to people except for its industrial uses. 

We would all get out and shoot into the sculpture. Everyone would take their turn. Some quiet people became empowered shooting the guns, others sat it out and declined to shoot. Some couldn't get enough of it. Different guns made different sounds. We talked and laughed and yelled out loud. We talked about art and our ambitions, of Smithson and Matta Clark and the Survival Research Lab. I would talk about the piece and people would laugh and take it seriously too. 

This sculpture was a guerilla piece in that it was unauthorized. It was on public lands and permission was never sought nor granted for the installation. The sculpture was built with a variety of pressures in mind. It took place against the backdrop of middle America in the 1980's, just the beginning of Regan's term. Nuclear war seemed immanent. I hoped to make a gesture about that, a way that thanatos would be avoided by the small acts of an artist. I had seen a philosophy professor come to class and dramatically drop a piece of chalk on the floor. He then said "i just changed the coast of China" and walked out. i took it to mean that perception was the material of media time. It was an idea later reflected i chaos theory as the butterfly effect.

After so many months I took the sculpture down and used all the steel to build a new piece. I visited the site years later to see the water high enough to cover the sculpture, at least partly. I could imagine the pipe just above the water's surface. I visited again in 2009 interrupting people who had an encampment under the bridge. 

guerilla sculpture

changing perception changing what is perceived

the butterfly effect

the psychic presence of nuclear war Reagan MADMAD

A social experience

Clash of Cultures