Beth Carter, Lucus Samaras and Christoph Schlingensief by Brandi Burch

Beth Carter received her degree in Fine Art from Sunderland University in the United Kingdom. In 1995, she was awarded 1^st prize in the “Northern Graduate Show ‘95” at The Royal College of Art, London. Afterwards, she traveled to Sri Lanka and India to study mythological sculpture. She later travelled to New Zealand, Mexico, Gambia, Kenya and Tanzania to further explore the precedents for this genre of sculpture. Her work has been shown in the US and abroad and appears in private collections throughout Europe, Asia and the US. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Like most artists, I’m inspired by many different things. But essentially my work stems from my internal world, I find things in everyday life, films, books, songs, people etc. act as triggers for ideas and images which are already there in my subconscious, like a big endless library…. the process of making art feels like finding external images which correspond as closely as possible to ones which are already quietly waiting in the wings. My head and my heart are full of ideas, they get developed by blocking out the world and listening to the quiet voices.

 

Lucas Samaras (born September 14, 1936) is an artist who was born in Kastoria, Greece. He studied at Rutgers University on a scholarship, where he met Allan Kaprow and George Segal. He participated in Kaprow’s “Happenings,” and posed for Segal’s plaster sculptures.^[1] Claes Oldenburg, in whose Happenings he also participated, later referred to Samaras as one of the “New Jersey school,” which also included Kaprow, Segal, George Brecht, Robert Whitman, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks and Roy Lichtenstein. Samaras previously worked in painting, sculpture, and performance art, before beginning work in photography. He subsequently constructed room environments that contained elements from his own personal history.^[2] His “Auto-Interviews” were a series of text works that were “self-investigatory” interviews.^[3] The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He has worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls “Photo-Transformations”.

• PS1 Exhibit

 Christoph Schlingensief (Oberhausen, 1960 – Berlin, 2010) constantly challenged and transgressed boundaries in his life and art. His work included experimental and feature film, theater, opera, performance, installation, literature, TV shows, radio plays… His art anticipates, comments on and reacts to its social context, touching on topics such as German history, religion, the institution of the family and media representations of current events. His radical and provocative demand for action and reaction question what he viewed as a destructive sense of political and artistic complacency and secured his exceptional position in contemporary art.

Born in Oberhausen, Germany in 1960, Schlingensief worked internationally for more than thirty years until his death in 2010. Not beholden to any one medium, Schlingensief moved between genres and disciplines dealing with political extremism and social discontentment, history and the present, combining these issues with universal questions relating to faith and superstition, truth and deception, and life and death. Whether creating films, critiquing society, establishing his own political party, building a reproduction of his childhood church, performing on stage until imprisoned by local law enforcement, founding a functioning Opera Village in Africa, or installing museum exhibitions, Schlingensief engaged deeply with his cultural and artistic milieu. He directed plays by William Shakespeare and operas by Richard Wagner, and was profoundly influenced by Joseph Beuys, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the Viennese Actionists .https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dJlYmQNxvRA