21 March – 3 May 2008
Opening Thursday 20 March at 18.00
Office Baroque Gallery is pleased to present "Owen Land: Logical Facades".
"Logical Facades" will be the first individual gallery exhibition of
acclaimed American artist Owen Land (°1944). Land debuted as an experimental
film maker in the 1960's with a critique of structural film. His practice
spans over several decades and includes mainly film works on 16mm and on
hi-video.
The exhibition "Logical Facades" at Office Baroque is the first attempt to
understand the continued engagement of Land's artistic and filmic practice
with the topics of economy, identity politics, and art history within the
framework of postconceptual artistic practices. Moreover it will focus on his
ability to combine critical narratives, with an eloquent, yet playful
post-conceptual aesthetic. The exhibition wishes to understand Owen Land both
as a source artist, and as peer artist, for a younger generation of European
and American artists including Fischli and Weiss, Jonathan Monk, Christopher
Williams, Omer Fast or Rodney Graham.
Owen Land was born and raised in Connecticut, USA. He studied acting and
acting improvisation at Goodman Drama School and Second City, Chicago. Land
founded the Experimental Theater Workshop at the Art Institute of Chicago and
wrote and directed several musical theater pieces. His first films are dated
around 1961. Land's two most complex films, according to Mark Webber, are "Wide
Angle Saxon" (1975), in which a man has a moment of spiritual revelation during
an avant-garde screening at the Walker Art Center, and "On the Marriage Broker
Joke" (1977), whose disparate cast of characters include two pandas discussing
and making an avant-garde film about the marketing of Japanese salted plums.
Currently Owen Land is finishing "Dialogues" (2007-ongoing) a feature length work
on hi-video. "Dialogues" is informed by Land's study of folklore, myth and history
and the theology of all major religions, including Gnosticism and Kabbala. It
ironically uses the form of the Platonic dialogue to explore the themes of
reincarnation, art criticism, and female sexual desire. "Dialogues" includes
pastiches of well-known Hollywood films as well as the films of Maya Deren,
Stan Brakhage, Jim McBride and others.
The exhibition "Logical Facades" will include six works. It embarks with the early
"Film in which there Appear Edge Lettering" from 1965-66, to clearly mark Land's
concern with structural film, while at the same time already distancing himself
from the solemn approach of his fellow film makers in the 1960's. "Logical Facades"
will further include "A film of their 1973 Spring Tour", 1974 and "Undesirables"
(1999), a rough cut of selected scenes on experimental film makers in a fictional
theory about the end of experimental film.
In 2009, Owen Land will be featured in a traveling individual exhibition that is
premiering in spring 2009 at the Kunsthalle Bern. "Dialogues" will be co-produced
by the Kunsthalle Bern.
The films of Owen Land have been preserved by the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna.
PRESS IMAGES AND DVD'S
Viewing copies of Land's films as well as stills for reproduction can be obtained
through Office Baroque Gallery. TWO FILMS BY OWEN LAND. (Paperback book. 178x114mm.
136 pages. Edited by Mark Webber) is the only publication currently available on the
work of Land. It can equally be ordered through Office Baroque Gallery. |