GREAT RIVERS BIENNIAL

The Great Rivers Biennial is a collaboration between the Contemporary and the Gateway Foundation (link http://www.gateway-foundation.org/launch.html ) designed to strengthen the local art scene in St. Louis. As many as three artists are selected by a panel of esteemed national jurors to receive an award of $15,000 each and an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

The goal of this innovative awards program is to identify talented emerging local artists, provide them financial assistance, raise the visibility of their work in both the Midwest and national arts community, and provide them with professional support from visiting critics, curators and dealers.

Emerging artists in the St. Louis area were invited to submit work from any of the following categories: drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, and multi-media. An emerging artist is someone in the early stages of his or her career development who has not yet received wide exhibition exposure locally or nationally or significant financial awards from other organizations.

During summer 2005, Great Rivers Biennial jurors reviewed all submissions and selected three emerging artists to receive the award. This year’s high profile panel of jurors included Elizabeth Dunbar, Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Gary Garrells, Senior Curator at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator of Exhibitions at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus.

The recipients of the inaugural Great Rivers Biennial 2004 were Jill Downen, Adam Frelin, and Kim Humphries who were selected by jurors Lisa Corrin, Director, Williams College Museum of Art; Debra Singer, Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen; and Hamza Walker, Department Director, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Moses
The Audiophile Series

Moses designs large-scale works that capture, monumentalize, and challenge the contemporary culture of hip-hop. In his exhibition, he assembles massive structures that house electronic equipment such as speakers, old stereo components, turntables, records, mixers, and microphones. Moses chops, reassembles, paints, hangs, and boasts about the 1,500 records, 351 speakers, 148 old stereo components, 42 turntables, three giant photographs, one microphone, and an SUV outfitted with hundreds of speakers throughout its exterior. The audio equipment amassed in the exhibition represents three years of national travel to collect over 50 years of consumer sound producing electronics.

The work in The Audiophile Series venerates all of its components as cultural artifacts, which stood as status symbols throughout America’s various subcultures. They are responsible for communication, education, attraction, celebration, and inspiration within the ghetto, the country, and the hills that belong to people of all races. Moses makes art in honor and respect of the past while challenging the new urban contemporaries. In the words of b-boy historian Jorge “Popmaster Fabel” Pabon, “Through the spirit of competition, hip-hop culture continues to present new ideas and innovations in the worlds of art and society.” A hip-hop DJ can spend years searching every record store, garage, and backyard bargain sale to find that one hot break beat, catch phrase, or obscure sound to thrill a party with a unique style that can’t be beat. Moses has done the same. Obsessively collecting these aged consumer stereo products and judiciously using only the best of the bunch, Moses has cultivated his own unique style. The Audiophile Series showcases a style respecting the past, exciting the present, and demanding a challenger for the future.

Matthew Strauss
Dead Language

Matthew Strauss has created a new series of contemporary still life paintings, entitled POEMS that are akin to the vanitas tradition, wherein artists employed simple imagery to create complex comments on materialism and transcendence, illusions and reality, and life and death. This dark, mysterious, and occasionally bitingly funny work possesses all these qualities, yet the target of his critique—the symbol of the vanity of worldly things—is the art historical canon.

The symbolic and fleeting quality of the traditional still life vanitas painting provides the conceptual framework in which Strauss is able to explore notions of futility, failure, and obsolescence. Most of the imagery is unsettling and strangely contemplative. In order to craft such imagery Strauss selects “dead” forms for pure formal reasons and for their inherent symbolic attributes (human skull and ribcage, fruit, tools, carnage). The content is presented before perfect, modular, square and rectangular planes of white paint marked with pencil, further articulating the Modernist grid. Vanitas paintings were intended to impart a moral lesson and incite meditation on death. Obsessed with the idea of death as the only absolute truth, Strauss updates the vanitas genre with a new iconography of the absurd that represents the passage of life, art, Modernism—a sort of post-everything aesthetic.

It is due to its tension between intention and meaning, illusion and reality, and specificity and ambiguity, that the vanitas formula is a viable strategy for Strauss’ visual language of manipulation. His formulaic stagings reveal a sense of despondency that challenges creative integrity, and presents it as inherently flawed, thus reconfirming the fact that questions of originality, authorship, fraud, and imitation are complex, and still worthy of (re)consideration.

Jason Wallace Triefenbach
Hero, Compromised (Autobiographical Fiction/Narrative Medley)

Jason Wallace Triefenbach’s exhibition encompasses a multi-media installation comprised of performance, music, spoken word, sculpture, and props. For two days, Triefenbach conducted a live performance at the Contemporary which he videotaped and then edited with additional footage shot off-site. Sculptures and props from the performance reside in the gallery as residue of what previously occurred, and the video is displayed on monitors within the space. With these various components, Triefenbach creates a woven four-part narrative that is part autobiography, part fiction, and is based upon a central character, the Protagonist Everyman, and his frustration with an overabundance of pop culture, fear of living in obscurity, and his attempt to escape from it all. According to Triefenbach, “This piece is a conglomeration of half finished puzzles, jokes, and associations—beginnings of stories or a bit from the middle, but never the whole picture.”

The journey Triefenbach’s character embarks on signifies one man’s experience and imaginings in an anonymous city that could be here (St. Louis) or anywhere. Multiple metaphors, references, and associations pertaining to consumerism, cultural iconography, the artist’s life, and political ideologies are embedded within the storyline, thus creating Triefenbach’s own fantastical expedition for the viewer to navigate, pose questions, seek answers, and formulate their own conclusions. This amalgamation in Triefenbach’s work creates a compelling tension between fact and fiction, which cannot be deciphered into an ultimate conclusion, but rather remains suggestive of multiple potential outcomes.