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Marty St. James
SOMEWHERE OR IN BETWEEN
January 6 - 26
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 6:00 - 8:00 PM RECEPTION
AN EXHIBITION OF RECENT VIDEO WORKS, DIGITAL PRINTS AND DRAWINGS
IN THE PROJECT ROOM @ CHELSEA ART MUSEUM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8
2:30 PM - INTRODUCTIONS: MEET-THE-ARTIST
St. James will discuss his work and meet museum visitors.
At 3:00 PM the discussion will continue as St. James is joined
by author/artist/new media theorist, Lev Manovich; Christiane
Paul, adjunct new media curator, Whitney Museum of American Art;
Barbara
London, curator, video and digital media, Museum of Modern Art;
Sue Hubbard, art critic, Independent Newspaper, London; Ken Feinstein,
artist/professor of experimental video. The discussion is moderated
by Mechthild Schmidt, master teacher, digital communications
and media, McGhee Divison, New York University.
MARTY ST. JAMES, London
based fine artist, is a modernist in post-modern clothing. As
an artist his primary medium, along with drawing, is digital technology
but his concerns are firmly rooted in the spiritual and Utopian
subtexts of modernism with its hallmark of self-reflexive thinking.
"This guy's work is dark, yet at the same time he recognizes
something in us all which at the same time we locate and understand
within
his work, something fundamentally familiar. In Russia he is described
as a visual poet penetrating our deepest thoughts and asking questions
we dare not ask."
In Somewhere Or In Between St. James dares
to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions as to where we as
viewers and artists
choose
to locate ourselves within contemporary society. The spaces he
explores are those balanced stylistically between figuration
and abstraction, between absence and presence, between idealization
and cynicism.
For him creativity – in line with Joseph Beuys' legacy
– is the purest form of political statement.
Included in the exhibition is the video triptych The Journey
of St. Maurin first shown in Moscow last year at the National Centre
for Contemporary Art. The journey is a recurrent metaphor, the
journey as quest, the journey as self-delineation. Through static,
figurative and moving images accompanied by sound the viewer is
drawn into a place of spiritual isolation and entrapment. St. Maurin
was a supposed heretic beheaded for his beliefs. After his death
he was said to have returned to his place of worship holding his
head in his hands. This horrific story of martyrdom acts as a metaphor
for conviction, for the strength of belief and underlines that
all experience is part of a continuing journey towards a goal of
self-realization. But the journey portrayed here is bleak. Through
the kinetic spiral created by the turning window we leave the enclosed
space of an anonymous room to travel through undisclosed locations,
both urban and rural, only to be spun back to a final frame of
empty blackness. No happy resolutions are proffered so that we
are invited to consider Yeats' famous lines:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Familyway is a single
channel video work. The stillness of Familyway stands both in
stylistic and emotional contrast to the St. Maurin
video. The frozen frames embody time at a stand still. In this
work Marty St. James explores ideas that have seduced him in
the writing of Sartre; how time separates the self from the
self, from
the self as it once was, from what we wish to be, from desires,
from things, from others. Yet in this stillness, in the conjoined
image of a family where the members reach out one to another,
there exists a contradiction, a seed of hope, a way forward
out of the
postmodern swamp of indifference, out of a universe dominated
by narcissism and commodity.
Sue Hubbard The Independent Newspaper London
Produced in cooperation
with the Program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts, Brooklyn
College, John J. A. Jannone,
Director.
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Made possible by generous support from
 
Reception sponsored by
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Biography
Marty St. James is a London, UK based artist born in Birmingham,
England. St. James studied at Bournville School of Art and Cardiff
College of Art under the directorship of the innovative art educator
Tom Hudson. He has concentrated on Performance Art, Video and Installation
Art (time based-media) and digital works since the 1980∫s.
During the 80∫s and 90∫s he undertook major Performance
art and video tours of Britain, Europe and North America.
St. James made his first video art work by appearing as a fictitious
contestant on the TV quiz game Mr. and Mrs. His video art works
have been shown and broadcast worldwide in galleries, festivals
and on network television, including TimeCode and Hotel produced
by Channel Four television. St. James invented the art term Video
Portraits exhibiting the 11 channel video portrait of the Olympic
gold medalist. The Swimmer and two others commissioned by the
National Portrait Gallery in London in 1991 all of which are in
the collection.
He has completed Residencies at Kunstakademiet, Trondheim, Norway
(1993); 101 Gallery Ottawa, Canada (1994): Banff Centre For The
Arts (1999), Canada and with the Kolodzei Foundation in Moscow
(2003). In 2000 he traveled around the world in researching his
artwork including North America and the Australian outback. St.
James represented UK in British Council Shows including Metropolitan
Museum of Photography in Tokyo (1998) and Contemporary Art Museum,
Nagoya (1995). Forty of his video works have been archived for
the nation (Britain) by the British Film Institute. The National
Portrait Gallery selected St. James's video portrait Boy/Girl
Video diptych to represent the last year 2000 in its millennium
exhibition
101 Portrait Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century alongside
major works by Picasso, Bacon, Warhol, Freud, Warhol, etc. In 2003
he
had a one-person show at the National Contemporary Arts Centre
in Moscow.
Artist's websites: martystjames.com and stjamesart.freeserve.co.uk.
Both events are FREE with museum admission.
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