PETER SEIDLER: THE PROTECTORS AND ANIMAL POWERS
December 5th to January 7th, 2007
On Exhibition Through Art Miami
The Madonna Building, 3940 North Miami Avenue (b/t NE 40th and NE 39th)
Also, By Appointment:
Allison Wilbur 646.267.9006
Nyehaus and Foundation 20 21 are pleased to present an extraordinary group of sculptures and paintings by revolutionary artist Peter Seidler. Seidler's installation The Protectors and Animal Powers is an ecstatic presentation of militarized beings. These manufactured objects internalize the pre-industrial order and portray material instantiations of immaterial systems. The seed vocabulary for this work combines several systems of language, iconography and technology in a new turbulence: the language of twenty-first century science fiction fantasy, the wrathful deities of the Himalayas, contemporary weapon systems, and classical statuary. The wrathful deity statues of earlier eras sought to depict enlightened or uplifted forms of aggression in warrior cultures. Today, as we slide toward a future that may be unthinkable, we are seeing a worldwide upsurge in the production and dispersal of militarized beings. This is the discursiveness of aggression.
Seidler's Protectors are warriors made of munitions: missiles, machine guns, bullet rounds and soldier's uniforms. Bearing features that are part-man and part-machine, they evoke sensations that are dangerous yet potentially benign. The Protectors investigates martial consciousness grown monstrous, consuming the identity of both individuals and societies. The enlightened warriors have been invoked and converted through mechanisms and systems designed to improve performance and responsiveness. These militarized bodies inhabit networked information spaces and technologies that convey location in real time and enable inconceivably complex weaponry to function. Their armaments include internal systems to facilitate monitoring by means of mind-computer communications and an abundance of sensory displays. Specifically, The Protectors demonstrate both violence and benevolence, or as Seidler states, "the uplifted warriorship or enlightened aggression necessary to advance to states of compassion."
Seidler's Animal Powers series, a bestiary of six sculptures envisions one possibility of what a post-human world might look like. The animals perch in taxidermied poses on free-floating bits of their respective habitats, like salvage from a dismantled natural history museum. In Animal Powers we enter a dystopia, a futuristic world of customized North American animals. Their augmented senses enable them to gather real-time frontline data from overhead surveillance and attack systems. Their high-performance militarized technological adaptations are based on amplification of qualities specific to each animal. The modifications are intended to enhance lethality, speed of communication, and the collation of information during attacks. Here we see animal powers arising from complex bio-systems reengineered for combat's future. Like The Protectors, each Animal Power appears to be very much alone, eternally prepared for an invisible, unknowable enemy who may strike at a given moment or who might not even show up.
It is worth noting that Seidler had The Protectors and Animal Powers fabricated in Delhi, in a factory that more typically produces life-size gods that are displayed in temples or paraded in festivals and then floated down the river. The prodigious sculptures, life-size and fantastic, are carved from clay mounted on a metal and wood armature, then cast in fiberglass; thus, an old-fashioned technique applied to a high-tech material in one of the world's most outsourcing-friendly nations yields intriguing specimens of the global economy.
Seidler, who attended CalArts in the late 1980s and the Whitney Independent Study Program in the early 1990s, spent the recent decade building Avalanche, a collaborative conceptual art project that quickly transformed itself into a pioneering Web-design company. Avalanche then merged with Razorfish to become one of the world's leading Web-development firms.
Peter Seidler's The Protectors and Animal Powers will be on view in the Madonna Building, 3940 N. Miami Avenue in the Miami Design District, during Art Basel Miami Beach.
Nyehaus is a commercial project space founded by devoted contemporary art collector and curator Tim Nye. In addition, Nyehaus commissions new works in order to expand and enliven the dialogue within an artist's oeuvre. Foundation 20 21 is a New York based arts organization and collecting entity with a mission to nourish exchanges among artists, writers, historians and philosophers as well as to present to a wider audience some of the most arresting work being produced in our increasingly complex visual culture.
December 5th to January 7th, 2007
On Exhibition Through Art Miami
The Madonna Building, 3940 North Miami Avenue (b/t NE 40th and NE 39th)
Also, By Appointment:
Allison Wilbur 646.267.9006
Nyehaus and Foundation 20 21 are pleased to present an extraordinary group of sculptures and paintings by revolutionary artist Peter Seidler. Seidler's installation The Protectors and Animal Powers is an ecstatic presentation of militarized beings. These manufactured objects internalize the pre-industrial order and portray material instantiations of immaterial systems. The seed vocabulary for this work combines several systems of language, iconography and technology in a new turbulence: the language of twenty-first century science fiction fantasy, the wrathful deities of the Himalayas, contemporary weapon systems, and classical statuary. The wrathful deity statues of earlier eras sought to depict enlightened or uplifted forms of aggression in warrior cultures. Today, as we slide toward a future that may be unthinkable, we are seeing a worldwide upsurge in the production and dispersal of militarized beings. This is the discursiveness of aggression.
Seidler's Protectors are warriors made of munitions: missiles, machine guns, bullet rounds and soldier's uniforms. Bearing features that are part-man and part-machine, they evoke sensations that are dangerous yet potentially benign. The Protectors investigates martial consciousness grown monstrous, consuming the identity of both individuals and societies. The enlightened warriors have been invoked and converted through mechanisms and systems designed to improve performance and responsiveness. These militarized bodies inhabit networked information spaces and technologies that convey location in real time and enable inconceivably complex weaponry to function. Their armaments include internal systems to facilitate monitoring by means of mind-computer communications and an abundance of sensory displays. Specifically, The Protectors demonstrate both violence and benevolence, or as Seidler states, "the uplifted warriorship or enlightened aggression necessary to advance to states of compassion."
Seidler's Animal Powers series, a bestiary of six sculptures envisions one possibility of what a post-human world might look like. The animals perch in taxidermied poses on free-floating bits of their respective habitats, like salvage from a dismantled natural history museum. In Animal Powers we enter a dystopia, a futuristic world of customized North American animals. Their augmented senses enable them to gather real-time frontline data from overhead surveillance and attack systems. Their high-performance militarized technological adaptations are based on amplification of qualities specific to each animal. The modifications are intended to enhance lethality, speed of communication, and the collation of information during attacks. Here we see animal powers arising from complex bio-systems reengineered for combat's future. Like The Protectors, each Animal Power appears to be very much alone, eternally prepared for an invisible, unknowable enemy who may strike at a given moment or who might not even show up.
It is worth noting that Seidler had The Protectors and Animal Powers fabricated in Delhi, in a factory that more typically produces life-size gods that are displayed in temples or paraded in festivals and then floated down the river. The prodigious sculptures, life-size and fantastic, are carved from clay mounted on a metal and wood armature, then cast in fiberglass; thus, an old-fashioned technique applied to a high-tech material in one of the world's most outsourcing-friendly nations yields intriguing specimens of the global economy.
Seidler, who attended CalArts in the late 1980s and the Whitney Independent Study Program in the early 1990s, spent the recent decade building Avalanche, a collaborative conceptual art project that quickly transformed itself into a pioneering Web-design company. Avalanche then merged with Razorfish to become one of the world's leading Web-development firms.
Peter Seidler's The Protectors and Animal Powers will be on view in the Madonna Building, 3940 N. Miami Avenue in the Miami Design District, during Art Basel Miami Beach.
Nyehaus is a commercial project space founded by devoted contemporary art collector and curator Tim Nye. In addition, Nyehaus commissions new works in order to expand and enliven the dialogue within an artist's oeuvre. Foundation 20 21 is a New York based arts organization and collecting entity with a mission to nourish exchanges among artists, writers, historians and philosophers as well as to present to a wider audience some of the most arresting work being produced in our increasingly complex visual culture.
