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HAMMER MUSEUM PREMIERES FILM OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA w/1 cut

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LOS ANGELES, CALIF. — The Hammer Museum is the inaugural venue for Crystal Palace, a new film by Austrian artist Mathias Poledna, shot on location in Papua New Guinea. On view through April 22, the film was commissioned as part of the Three M Project, a partnership between the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, to jointly commission new works by emerging artists.

“Mathias Poledna: Crystal Palace” is organized by Russell Ferguson, chief curator and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Hammer Museum.

“Crystal Palace” is an installation of a 35mm film comprising a small number of contemplative, static and lengthy shots of the montane rainforest landscape of the southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. The film, close to 30 minutes long, will be presented as a large-scale projection. Using tightly framed medium-close to medium-wide shots, the film’s few and carefully selected scenes capture the luscious colors, patterns, textures, structures and the overall abstract color fields created by these natural elements.

Only minor changes in light and movement in foliage provide visual cues to time passing. The film is accompanied by a dense and highly edited soundtrack mixing on-location as well as archival field recordings of, among other ambient sounds, distinct bird calls from this region.

“Poledna’s work evokes a certain tension between the actual and the fabricated,” said Ferguson, the exhibition’s curator. “The film is literally about a place in the Papua New Guinea rainforest, something extremely specific and local. Conversely, Crystal Palace is almost apart from historical place and time as it creates a utopian, intangible location that invites us to think about assumptions associated with concepts of ‘nature’ and how we attach meaning to images”.

In his work, Poledna specifically references the 1951 album Sounds of a Tropical Rainforest, produced by Folkways Records for the American Museum of Natural History. Though the album was intended as an authentic document to accompany an exhibition about Amazon tribespeople at the museum, the recordings were made almost entirely at the Bronx Zoo. Informed by film history, Poledna also cites the interconnections between early film and popular and avant-garde cinema in addition to the 1960s ethnographic films of Hermann Schlenker as influences to Crystal Palace, which, similar to Schlenker’s films, lacks an authoritative, narrative voice as it investigates a foreign place filtered through the camera’s lens.

Poledna was born in 1965 in Vienna, Austria, where he studies at the University of Applied Arts and University of Vienna. He has had solo exhibitions in Vienna at Galerie Meyer Kainer and the Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig, as well as at Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne.

Poledna’s work has been included in group exhibitions at such institutions as the Generali Foundation, Vienna; the Stedekijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Tate Liverpool. His work was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2004, and Manifesta 1 in 1996.

The museum is at 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, at Westwood Boulevard. For information, www.hammer.ucla.edu or 310-443-7041.