‘Speed Of Vision’ At Aldrich Museum For The Summer

RIDGEFIELD — The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art will present “Speed of Vision,” a highly innovative exhibition composed of single-channel videotapes and mixed-media installations, June 18 to September 6. The exhibition will explore how the video medium can manipulate and influence the viewers’ sense of time, inviting visitors to the museum to assume the role of sci-fi “time travelers.”

Eleven ambitious and sophisticated works will be featured, each requiring the viewer to reexamine the paradoxical conception of time as both a real and an artificial construction.

The museum will be divided into three distinct time “zones”: slow motion, real time, and hyper-speed. The artists represented will challenge the way the passage of time is perceived by exploiting editing and filming techniques to their fullest.

Curated and designed by Matthew Yokobosky, an independent curator and exhibition designer at Brooklyn Museum of Art, the exhibition will provide a complex environment of overlapping sounds and juxtaposed images. Included in the exhibition design will be a video compilation which will explore the relationship between man’s ambition to travel fast, and his simultaneous desire to record that accomplishment.

The compilation will highlight documentary scenes of space travel in contrast to Hollywood film excerpts. While the time “zones” of the exhibition and the video compilation could be viewed in sequence, visitors will be invited to approach the exhibition in its entirety, creating their own associations and forging individual paths through the various installations.

The work of both established and emerging artists will be represented, including Doug Aitken, Jonas Akerlund, Charles Atlas, Jessica Bronson, Eiko & Koma, Annika Eriksson, Tom Kalin, Matthew McCaslin, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Nam June Paik, and Kathy Rose. Several of these artists rely on performance as well as video for their work, and performances by Eiko & Koma and others are scheduled in conjunction with the exhibition run.

A full-color illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition will feature an essay by Mr Yokobosky and a specially commissioned book project by the New York-based photographer Judy Linn, which highlights the exhibition’s theme, “speed of vision.”

Scheduled exhibition programs include “Contemporary Context: Judy Linn,” on Sunday, July 9, from 4 to 6 pm. On Sunday, August 13, from 4 to 6 pm, the museum will host a similar program, “Contemporary Context: Charles Atlas,” with one of the most innovative and honored interpreters of dance and performance today. Cost for either program is $10, and reservations are requested.

The museum will also host four presentations by performance artists with work in “Speed of Vision.” An opening reception for this major summer exhibition is planned for Sunday, June 18, from 4 to 6 pm; the first of the performance artists will be at the library that afternoon at 5 pm.

The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art is at 258 Main Street/Route 35 in Ridgefield. Call 203/38-4519 for additional information, including details on Sunday’s opening reception and performance.