Annette DiMeo Carlozzi
Curator of American and Contemporary Art
Paul Chan: Present Tense will be the premiere venue for 2nd Light, the second in Chan's new, seven-part series of small-scale projected meditations on faith and politics. 1st Light was unveiled at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and is currently on view at this year's Whitney Biennial. Using shadow imagery to evoke a dreamlike state where truths are hard to grasp, in 2nd Light Chan imagines a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape and the stirrings of those who have apparently survived. Ominous and silent, the work mixes abstraction and representation, vivid color and somber black and white, to suggest both terror and perhaps a glimmer of hope.
Among other major works in the show will be Chan's 2004 operatic animation, My birds...trash...the future..., whose bleak landscape includes a diverse cast of murdered artists, feral creatures, frenzied paparazzi, and terrorists. Chan uses Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the book of Revelation as points of departure for an exploration of cruelty and compassion, despair and hope, and the place of faith in a war-torn, violence-filled society. This two-channel digital video will be projected on an enormous hanging screen, accompanied nearby by a series of 24 engaging animation studies.
Also to be featured in the exhibition is The Constellation Series, a group of 10 large, framed inkjet drawings from 2005. In these works, Chan has renamed 10 constellations from the Milky Way galaxy after endangered principles of democracy such as a free press. The work articulates Chan's commitment to political idealism in a poetic and unexpected manner.
