I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with my good friend Anthony Discenza on the creation of new work made possible through the generosity of BAVC's Rohstoff: [raw material] exhibition. The resulting project, Universal Moments, includes a sound/media installation, a single channel video and a series of 22 prints. Thank you to BAVC, particularly Daniela Delvos for organizing the exhibition and Julie Lantz for providing us with great sound engineering.
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STATEMENT ABOUT THE WORK:
Universal Moments represents the first collaboration between longtime friends and fellow artists Rebeca Bollinger and Anthony Discenza, and reflects the artists’ shared interest in the archive, lists, textual description of visual situations, and the ways in which our memories and perception are filtered through the lens of media representations. The print and video pieces included in this exhibition were constructed from logs of stock and archival footage—the vast archives of which represent a broad range of genres and sources, from comedy, horror, action and romance movies, to commercials, cartoons, newsreels and other historical media. The logs of this material, intended solely as a kind of index to be used in the selection of images for re-purposing in new media content, differ markedly from conventional script- or story-writing. Here, descriptive language is pared down to the bone—the logs employ an almost telegraphic verbal shorthand to produce supposedly neutral descriptions of every shot that makes up the footage. Yet through this extreme reduction of language, slippages and juxtapositions emerge, producing oddly truncated narratives that are at once dreamlike, and at the same time, deeply revealing of underlying cultural assumptions.

A flat world by my friend Cole who visited me one day at the studio. An igloo and animals were involved.

These are some preliminary drawings for the project. One version of the awning was a sculpture comprised of multiple beveled 3/4 inch layers of glass, cross cut and laminated with color interlayers to create a piece that would optically confound the space and surrounding views through a series of prisms. Apparently impossibly heavy, enough to rip off the building's new facade, that version will not be realized.

Over the past few months, I've been working on projects that concern depictions of space -- perceptual, social, structural, cinematic, dead asset strip malls, ideas about commerce and food preparation. Below are some collaborations and works in progress.

GLASS AWNING PROJECT
A commission for David B. with architect Addison Strong.

UNIVERSAL MOMENTS

STRIP MALL SOCIETY

Mall Trawl...

Ursula Brookbank
Jordan Biren
Glen Helfand