Current Exhibition
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July 13 - August 14, 2011 Reception Saturday, July 16, 2011 6-8pm Live + Super 8 Film Performance by Joshua Churchill + Paul Clipson Swarm Gallery is pleased to present Threshold(s), a solo exhibition and site-specific sound and light installation by Joshua Churchill. Joshua Churchill creates immersive site-specific sound and light installations and photographs that explore the aesthetic, emotive, and historic qualities of environments and objects as they exist in states of transition, disuse, or
decay. Often focusing on the crossroads between urban and rural, organic and inanimate, Churchill's work enmeshes the viewer in the very textures and stimuli he uses to engage, act upon, and recontextualize his subjects. For his solo exhibition at Swarm Gallery, Churchill has rebuilt a shack-like structure inspired by the small and ambiguous dilapidated shelters found along railroad lines that traverse the countryside. Focusing on the enigmatic nature
of these structures, Churchill has reanimated the displaced shelter with sound and light while restricting physical access and view of the interior, creating a cryptic tension between the viewer and the work. Also on view will be a
selection of works from a new series of photographs by the artist. This exhibition is the fourth project of BUILDING STEAM, a year-long sound program curated by Jeff Eisenberg, Svea Lin Soll, and Aaron Ximm. BUILDING STEAM is in part funded by Southern Exposure's Alternative Exposure Grant Program. In the project space, Swarm presents a new video installation by Doug Garth Williams. Williams' work explores the way we perceive things as well as the apparent ease with which our perceptions can be altered. He is interested in both the fundamental properties that unconsciously direct observation and behavior, and the way those properties can be consciously manipulated to change the way we see. These investigations take the form of videos, interactive installations and public interventions. Often using himself as the subject, his installations tend toward reflexive, humorous and uncanny. His work playfully confines expectations and elicits those tenuous unguarded moments of questioning.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES Joshua Churchill was born in Oakland, CA. Since earning a BA in Studio Arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1998, he has exhibited and performed his work both nationally and abroad. Venues include: Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center (New York), COCO (Vienna, Austria), NOMA (San Francisco), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Adobe Books Backroom Gallery (San Francisco), Audio Visual Arts (New York), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Meridian Gallery (San Francisco), Chapel of the Chimes (Oakland), Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco), Recombinant Media Compound (San Francisco), 7hz (San Francisco), National Showa Kinen Park (Tokyo), New Media Scotland, Post Gallery (Los Angeles), and Galeria Ze Dos Bois (Lisbon, Portugal). He currently lives and works in San Francisco. This is his first solo exhibition at Swarm Gallery. Doug Garth Williams, born in 1982, received a B.A. at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, before completing his M.F.A. at Mills College (Oakland) in 2010. He has received a number of honors, including the Herringer Family Award for Excellence in Art and Murphy Cadogan Fellowship in the Visual Arts in 2009, and a Kala Fellowship and Residency (Berkeley) in 2010. His work has shown at film festivalsnationally and internationally, NewFilmmakers at the Anthology Film Archives (NY), Arizona State University Art Museum Short Film and Video Festival, International Videoart Festival, Casoria Contemporary Art Museum (Naples, Italy), Green Film Festival (Seoul, Korea), Crosstalk Video Art Festival (Budapest, Hungary), Bangkok Indiefest (Thailand), Burbank Internationsl Film Festival (CA), Rotterdam International Film Festival (Netherlands), Exhibitions include Southern Exposure (SF), RoyalNoneSuch Gallery (Oakland), E6 Gallery (SF). This is his first solo installation at Swarm Gallery.
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