Public Art Piece Wins New England Critics Award
Artist Brian Knep Gets Lab at Systems Biology, Exhibition at NY Gallery
“Deep Wounds,” a media installation last spring in Memorial Hall by Boston artist Brian Knep, has been chosen to receive the award for “Best Exhibition of Time-Based Art, Boston-Area (Film, Video, and Performance)” by the International Association of Arts Critics/New England. The award was presented on February 28 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to Knep and the Office for the Arts at Harvard.
The site-specific project—an interactive video installation that explored the lost relationships resulting from war—was commissioned by the Public Art Program, Office for the Arts, as part of the artist’s year-long Harvard residency in collaboration with the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School. “Deep Wounds” was on view at Harvard from April 6-30, 2006. The residency was sponsored in part by the Provost’s Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration.
“Brian’s residency at Harvard led to the creation of a poignant and elegantly articulated work,” says Cathleen McCormick, Director of Programs at OFA. “This award underscores our interest in providing a laboratory setting where artists can research and develop new work.”
Memorial Hall is the landmark Harvard structure dedicated to those from the university who fell in defense of the Union during the Civil War. Intrigued by its architecture and history, Knep created an artwork that explored this memorial purpose, and also the complexity of reconciliation. His three-channel video installation appeared as a glowing 45’4” x 10’8” skin on the surface of the marble floor, and evolved as viewers traversed the space, causing a blistering of the light. Fragments of text including the death dates of Harvard’s Confederate fallen, as well as historical and imagined relationships—such as brother, husband, friend, roommate—were revealed before the lit surface mended.
The Paris-based International Association of Arts Critics (Association Internationale des Critiques d’art, AICA), founded in 1949 as an affiliate of UNESCO, comprises 4,000 critics, scholars, curators, and art historians in 74 national sections. Each year AICA’s U.S. Section invites its nearly 400 members to vote for the best exhibitions created during that season, to acknowledge exceptional work contributed by artists, curators, and dealers in visual arts. The New England chapter holds its own awards ceremony to honor area efforts, which are also announced at the National AICA/USA awards.
Marc Kirschner, Professor of Systems Biology and head of that department, reflects: “Deep Wounds is a beautiful example of how art can form a stage for people to interact directly with the unresolved passions of history. In our own memories, painful experiences come into sharp focus and dissolve, then appear in different shapes at different times; Brian Knep’s art has shown us how the computer can allow a new kind of intersection between the contemporary individual and past experiences frozen in time.”
Knep Residency Leads to Exhibitions, Lab at Systems Biology
The opportunity for Knep to take his work to a new level while at Harvard led to Systems Biology establishing a lab for him this year, in addition to exhibitions in New York and Boston.
“I am working closely with Harvard Medical School scientists to film the development of several animal species,” explains Knep, “including frogs, worms and yeast cells, and I am writing custom software to track the animals and manipulate the images. The results will be used as the raw material for a series of works, both projected films and interactive pieces, about change and aging.”
Knep will have solo exhibits at Ron Feldman Fine Arts in New York (February 10-March 10) and at Judi Rotenberg Gallery in Boston (April 21-29).
“The April show,” says Knep, “will have some of the new works relating to the Harvard residencies. There’s no separation between the work done in the 05/06 residency and the current one—it’s all been one big learning experience leading to these new pieces."
