Press Release

Mark Depman & Mary Beth Edelson

Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to present a new installation by Mark Depman.

Depman’s photographic and computer-aided work continues to explore the iconography of science fiction, military technology and computer software as it infiltrates his depiction of the domestic mise-en-scène.

One group of dense photographic abstractions are details from an ongoing computer-based mapping of places, dislocations, and traces of language.

In the centre of the gallery are monolithic and ground based illumine cent works that chronicle a personal science fiction gone haywire. Drawing from seemingly idyllic suburban videotape capture, Depman uses the apparent tools of the engineer, the surgeon, the filmmaker, the general, to terrorize the objects of desire. But he stops short of annihilation…and drops his weapons. Th extensions crumble and lay exposed the ground floor of his work.

Depman collaborates with documentary filmmaker Robert Ross in a new video installation in the gallery’s back room. The material Stan Brakhage dealt with in his 1971 film “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes” is revisited. A sequence of the three short music videos presents an alarming scenario. From the body’s essential vulnerability arise the possibilities of compassion, knowledge, pornography and panic.

In the downstairs gallery

Nicole Klagsbrun in conjunction with A/C Project room is pleased to announce a selection of photographs from twenty years of the private performance work of Mary Beth Edelson. The body/site performances of the early 1970’s presented at Nicole Klagsbrun were created when Edelson lived in Washington, D.C., and include a series to be shown for the first time in N.Y.C. Return-to-the-site photographic performances of the past summer are being shown along with recent silk-screens on chiffon at the A/C Project Room.

Beginning in 1970, Edelson’s precedent-setting photographic performances laid claim to her body as a legitimate subject and site for the construction of a positive and critical female identity. IN this work, Edelson also sought redress for the censorship and objectification of the female body by what is now referred to as the male “gaze”. Not without a sense of humor, Edelson “played god(dess)” through the assumption of different guises which invoked the incarnation and withdrawal of a goddess in an effort to reclaim her body and to access a new spiritual ground for women.

The exhibition will be on view from February 13 to March 13, 1993.