MARY GEORGE: LIFE ALTERING HEAD SPACE DESIGNS

Mary George's, Life Altering Head Space Designs project utilizes the gallery as a store, showcasing portable/wearable sculptures. Visitors will be able to try on the sculptures and even go for a walk to test the various effects outside the gallery. The gallery will also be equipped with mirrors so audiences may transform themselves inside the store.

Life Altering Head Space Designs has grown out of George's desire to create art that is useful on a variety of levels. The sculptures function as tools that attempt to be life altering, or at the very least perspective-shifting devices. On other levels the project instigates a group dynamic, verging on a sense of dynasty. As the saying goes, "Birds of a feather flock together." The degree of perspective shifts depends on the imagination and interaction of the audiences with the sculptural objects. The sculptures/tools make use of an array of pound store/dollar store extravagances: hair extensions, lamp shades, magnifying lenses and other cheap manmade and natural elements that are intended to affect the senses to varying degrees. Water bottles partially filled with water become lenses to be looked through amidst a mass of long hair. Everyone has a lampshade on their head; the world goes soft when viewed through water and rainbow tinted plastic discs. People are united by the weirdness of these cheap effects that come to us via the acknowledgement of the intended transcendental absurdity of mass produced-plastic-non-drug-related-psychedelic things that people buy.<

Mary George was born in Ohio in 1976. She’s lived a nomadic existence traveling all around the U.S. and residing in Illinois and Florida before moving to Los Angeles in 1990. She moved to Oakland, CA in 1994 to study at CCAC before transferring to the San Francisco Art Institute (thanks to Sharon Grace) where she totally warped off and received a BFA. She has worked in many eccentric institutions, Ann Kong’s World Famous Bleach Bottle Pig Farm just to name one. Where is Ann Kong? Mary wants to know as she is working on a musical drama based on those Neil Young obsessed times. Mary moved to London where she earned a Masters in Fine Art at Byam Shaw school of Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She now lives and works in London. She is also a guitar player and singer in a band called The HarshMellows. Her work has been shown at In Situ, Paris; Byam Shaw School of Art, London; The New York Underground Film Festival; and The Luggage Store, San Francisco.

REUBEN LORCH-MILLER: THE POWER OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT

Reuben Lorch-Miller's The Power of Darkness and Light is a digital video that is composed of frames of total white and total black, giving the effect of a patterned strobe. The pattern and duration of the light is dictated by the audio signal of the 1986 Slayer record Reign in Blood. In making this video, the complete recording was played from beginning to end. The rhythms, frequencies, structure, and intonation of the audio were transposed into a visual pattern of light and dark. He was inspired to reduce the recording to a simple visual form while retaining the original compositional elements. Through the use of a musical source, the structure of the video is defined by the musicians' compositional decisions. The action of the strobe light, while operating as a basic patterning mechanism also hints at the references of the genre structure, stage performance, and light shows. In showing this video as a silent projection, Lorch-Miller hopes to avoid a direct reference to the source and is more interested in creating an environment that explores ideas of visual phenomena, simple pattern and structure, perceptual experiences, emotional response to stimuli, and metaphoric qualities of light and darkness. He is also interested in how the space in which this video is shown changes between one of darkness to one of light. As part of the exhibition and project, Queens Nails Annex has commissioned Lorch-Miller to create a limited edition experimental audio CD.

Reuben Lorch-Miller grew up in Washington State. He lived in San Francisco, earning an MFA in New Genres from San Francisco State University in 2001. He currently lives in New York City. His artwork has been shown at Exit Art, New York, NY; University of Tartu, Estonia; Primo Piano Gallery, Lecce, Italy; and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA. He has two cats.