ACETONE REALITY - SARA MAGENHEIMER & MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
January 18 - February 8, 2025
ARTIST BIOS:
SARA MAGENHEIMER
Sara Magenheimer is an artist preoccupied with language whose work spans filmmaking, video installation, writing, sound and sculpture. She is based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the University Art Museum in Albany, NY, New Museum, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including the Flaherty Seminar, Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, EMPAC at RPI, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Award, the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2020 and awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book length work of writing. Magenheimer is an Associate Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase College and faculty in the Moving Image discipline at the Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
Michael Bell-Smith is an artist based in New York. His work has been exhibited and screened in museums and galleries internationally, including: MoMA, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, DC; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, ES; The New Museum, New York; Tate Liverpool, UK; Greater New York (2016), MoMA PS1; Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; The 2008 Liverpool Biennial, UK and The 5th Seoul International Media Biennale. He is the chair of the New Media department at SUNY Purchase College, and the co-chair of the Moving Image discipline at the Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
WEB PROJECTS
“Technology Entertainment Design (TED)”
Michael Bell-Smith
Site Link
“Is there an after-taste of life in these graves?...”
Sara Magenheimer
Site Link
Sara Magenheimer’s web project “Is there an after-taste of life in these graves?...” is a clock. The time is represented by a different flower slowly blooming for every hour of the day and night: 24 flowers total. Movement is barely perceptible, much like watching flowers bloom in life. These flower videos are found footage, collected, rotoscoped, processed and time stretched, but they refer to actual flowering plant species that bloom at the corresponding hour in nature.
Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, came up with the concept of the flower garden as a way to tell time, but it has not been executed successfully in non-digital conditions due to the conflicting needs of the plants. Linnaeus also invented binomial nomenclature, such as Homo (genus) Sapiens (species) for humans. Before binomials, names of plants in books were strings of words that formed a nuanced description and prior to that they were verbally described in native tongues. Plants were defined by context, use and vernacular inflection. Both plants and animals had names in indigenous languages, but Linnaeus renamed them with imperial Latinisms.
His approach was essentially to fragment, label and systematize all of nature. There is a severance, perhaps a violent distillation, in the use of these organized names. His system was also a way to commodify nature, incorporating identification into the sale and propagation of plants for a variety of uses. Binomial nomenclature brings to mind other binary relations, such as the relationship between help and control or the necessity of death and decay for the creation of new life.
“Is there an after-taste of life in these graves? And in the flowers’ mouths do bees find the hint of a word refusing speech? O flowers, prisoners of our instincts toward happiness, do you return to us with our dead in your veins? Flowers, how can you escape our grip? How can you not be our flowers? Does the rose really use all its petals to fly away from us? Does it want to be only a rose, nothing but a rose? No one’s sleep beneath so many eyelids?”
-Cemetery by Rainer Maria Rilke