Converge: Ghraib Bag is included in the Museum of Art & Design's Out of Hand: Materializing the Post Digital, curated by Ron Labacco.
Viewers are encouraged to use their smart phones to see the animation for the exhibition. A local QR TAG takes them to the animation (click here) or by typing http://www.thwack.tv. These works will be up until September 1, 2014.
Converge: Graib Bag is connected to Rees’s sculptures from 2003-2010 from the Putto Series. Located within the grotesque and the uncanny, Rees experimented and developed a method of working that used animations and industrial forms of manufacture to create large scale sculptures and media experiences that engaged political realities. The ideas grew out of art historical antecedents but were extended to address our new political reality, a nation at ware willing to stretch legalities and to engage in torture. Converge recalled Hans Bellmer sculptures, Calder’s large modernist plaza installations, and Nauman’s linguistic constructions but then also the photographs from the prison at Abu Graib. The body is a conglomeration of many bodies: the sense of multiple consciousnesses occupying the same corporeal body, or the valences of an object containing various layers of the political, the aesthetic, the historical and so on. As such they begged questions about our technologies, our desires, and our moralities. They put the viewer in the cockpit view of a train wreck of tendencies. They reflected a concern about war and our divided culture.