NONSITE || Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson

The Nonsite Collective's "Translation As Social and Aesthetic Practice" curriculum continues at SF Camerawork with:

Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson

Thurs, July 10 at 6 pm
SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
415.512.2020 ext: 105

Amy Trachtenberg
Found in Translation on Paros

“In considering a place we look at passages of time, development and decay. As an outsider to any locale, we find ourselves in states of translation: both the navigator and the one in need of guiding. The physical and cultural realms are layered by an accrual of rites and texture to be misconstrued by the interloper. Without mutual consent, but as a means of interpretation, I use the camera like a tongue in search of speech. The projected slides in rhythmic sequences are a case study in questioning.”

Elliot Anderson
Weeding-In: Site Translation As Environmental Practice

“Weeds are hardy survivors, opportunists of the cultivated. Arts of translation produce an excess: the non-translatable textual weed. Along with cultivation in the field of language, persistent weeds return to border and trouble rhetorics of the garden. Writing about the Non-Site, Robert Smithson proposes a space of translation: "Between the actual site … and the Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance [where]…everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions." Smithson’s work saw entropy in the sites of his investigation— industrial, suburban, forgotten. “Weeding-In” is a project that examines the forces of return. As industrial and “blighted” neighborhoods are gentrified, this work counters with the natural processes of reclamation that operate in the space between the entropic and the rebuilt. A greenhouse laboratory is erected in a post-industrial landscape to host performances and experiments designed to challenge existing taxonomies of loss and gentrification operating on industrial landscapes.”

Amy Trachtenberg is a visual artist, graduate of L’école des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her collaborative projects have engaged widely with poets, composers, architects and landscape architects. Permanent installations include Groundwork, for a San Jose, CA library and The Atrium Project at Children’s Hospital Oakland. The Natural History of Market Street was commissioned by Art in Transit of the San Francisco Art Commission and Illuminance installed for the inauguration of Pixar’s new campus. She is currently designing artwork for the BART extension between Oakland and San Jose. Her forthcoming book, Groundwork from Oro Press shows the process of a site-specific piece from concept to installation with essays by Rebecca Solnit and Mary Burger. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Elliot Anderson is an artist working with interactive media technologies, curator, educator, and engineer. He is an Assistant Professor of Art in Electronic Media in the Art Department and Digital Arts New Media Graduate Program at the University of California Santa Cruz. Incorporating photography, video, sound, and interaction with the computer, Anderson creates printwork, installations, and sets for performance. Currently, his artwork focuses on on the historical, cultural, and environmental perceptions of American landscape. His work is exhibited nationally and internationally in venues including Princeton University Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Tokyo Zokei University Gallery and Museum, Tokyo, and the M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco.