Mayumi Hamanaka, above ground - My Lay (detail) (2011), Archival pigment print, pins, 30 x 40 x 1.5 inches

March 5 - April 10, 2011
Gallery | aboveground | Mayumi Hamanaka

Project | Objects of Memory | Seth Cluett
Third project of "Building Steam," a sound program curated by Jeff Eisenberg, Svea Lin Soll, and Aaron Ximm

Opening Saturday, March 5, 2011 6-8pm
Featuring a sound performance by Seth Cluett

Are their faces really different from our own? There are those who refused to believe this. And there are those of us who sincerely look upon the ruins today ... Those who pretend to take hope again as the image fades... Those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who do not hear the cry to the end of time.

- From Night and Fog, a 1955 French documentary short film about the Holocaust

Swarm Gallery is pleased to present, aboveground, an exhibition of new work by Mayumi Hamanaka on view from March 5 - April 10, 2011. The artist's first solo show with Swarm Gallery features large-scale photo-based cut-out images and photography.

Growing up in the climate of rapid economical growth and globalization, Mayumi Hamanaka's art practice has followed concepts of individualism, mass-circulated trends, personal histories/memories buried within historical events, and power struggles of individuals within group dynamics.

aboveground explores the connection between historical events overseas and the present day where we stand. As written in Night and Fog, there are reverberating effects of past incidents over time and place, affecting more people than realized. Using recognizable source images collected from 20th Century wars such as WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War, Mayumi hand cuts and slightly abstracts them. By this action, she examines her own distorted perspective and experience in the context of how history is written, and invites the viewer to do the same. Re-imagining the past, we come up with a more accurate picture of the present.

BIO: Mayumi Hamanaka was born in Japan, where she studied Art History at the International Christian University in Tokyo. She went on to receive a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and an M.F.A. in photography from California College of the Arts in 2004. She was awarded a Murphy Fellowship Award in 2003 as well as a residency at the Taiwan Artist Village in Taipei in 2005. Outside of the Bay Area, she has shown in Chicago, New York, Albuquerque, Tucson, and Taiwan. Mayumi currently resides in Oakland, where she is a lecturer at California College of the Arts.

Project | Objects of Memory
Seth Cluett

Seth Cluett's work on Youtube
> Sound performance at exhibit opening
> Tracing Moving Circles (Neighborhood Memory) - Part 1 (Walking)

Swarm Gallery is happy to welcome Ohio-based sound artist, Seth Cluett, for his installation in our project space, on view from March 5 - April 10, 2011. This installation is part three of our year-long sound program "Building Steam," curated by Jeff Eisenberg, Svea Lin Soll, and Aaron Ximm.

Seth Cluett's work examines the nature and act of recorded sound through the lens of memory. Rather than viewing a recording as a capturing of reality as it is experienced, the tangible or even representative trace of a previous event, Cluett considers recorded sound as a thing unto itself- a catalyst for the listener's imagination, one which mirrors the processes of memory in its own unique way.

In Seth's words, "...much like memory, recorded media provide only a blueprint, not a full experience; a recording defines a structure but relies on imagination to fill in the details through confabulation...Recorded sound (re)presents a form of experience that is separate and different from, yet inextricably linked to, the personal memories imprinted by the act of recording itself."

Cluett's projects of recordings, performances, installations, handmade works and viewer interactive tasks uses extreme magnification of simple everyday actions to exposes the impossibility of squaring what we remember with what we've recorded. In this way, Seth's work sits in the hazy territory created by a cognitive and perceptual distance between the recorded and the remembered.

BIO: Seth Cluett (b. Troy, NY) is an artist, performer, and composer whose work ranges from photography and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing. His "subtle...seductive, immersive" (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as "rigorously focused and full of detail" (e/i) and "dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature" (The Wire). Exploring the territory between the auditory and other senses, Cluett's works are marked by a detailed attention to perception and to sound's role in the creation of a sense of place and the workings of memory. The recipient of grants and awards from Meet the Composer as well as the Andrew W. Mellon, Naumberg, and Malcolm Morse Foundations, his work is documented on Errant Bodies Press, Line, Radical Matters, Sedimental, Crank Satori, BoxMedia, Stasisfield, and Winds Measure. Cluett is currently on the faculty of the School of Fine Arts at Miami University of Ohio where he teaches in the Music Department and the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies.