FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 92 Plymouth Street @ Washington Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY 11201 Tel: 718.834.8761 www.smackmellon.org Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm Two Solo Exhibitions Janet Biggs, Somewhere Beyond Nowhere Aude Moreau, Sugar Carpet Exhibition Dates: January 12 – February 24, 2013 Artists' Reception: Saturday, January 12, 5-8pm Smack Mellon is pleased to present Janet Biggs and Aude Moreau as part of Brooklyn / Montréal, a contemporary art event with the aim of establishing a cultural exchange between 2 cities, 16 institutions and 40 artists. This is the first major artistic and cultural encounter between Montréal and New York City in over 10 years. In connection with Brooklyn / Montréal, Smack Mellon is partnered with The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, where French-born Montréal artist Aude Moreau and Brooklyn based artist Janet Biggs presented new video projects from October 4, 2012 to January 6, 2013. For this iteration of the exchange, Janet Biggs will be screening her latest video project Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, a two-channel video installation filmed during Biggs' expedition with The Arctic Circle program. Aboard a hundred-year-old ice-class Schooner sailing vessel with other scientists and artists participating in the program, the group started at Longyearbyen, an international territory of Svalbard just 12 degrees from the North Pole and headed as far north as the pack ice would allow them. Biggs, armed with a flare gun and camera, traveled alone onto a glacial island and filmed herself engulfed within the stark and extreme environment. In contrast to Biggs' expansive landscape, Aude Moreau's large-scale installation Sugar Carpet blocks out the majority of the gallery restricting visitors to the perimeter of the space. The delicate installation is comprised of 2 tons of refined white sugar meticulously spread into an oversized carpet embellished with Persian rug motifs. Referring to domestic comfort, the use of refined sugar within the gallery's industrial space also spotlights the undervalued process of production and its often overlooked violent history. This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Smack Mellon’s Members. Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York City Council Member Stephen Levin, and with generous support from Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, Jerome Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation, The Greenwich Collection Ltd, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and 2012 JPMorgan Chase Regrant Program administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) We would like to thank The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lambent Foundation, Art Dealers Association of America, Richard Prince Studio LLC., Athena Foundation, Gilbert MacKay Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Lily Auchincloss Foundation Inc., New York Council for the Humanities, and all of the individuals who donated and volunteered to help us clean up and rebuild after Hurricane Sandy. Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management. Janet Biggs Somewhere Beyond Nowhere Filmed in a wind-wracked, frigid landscape, my new 2-channel video installation, "Somewhere Beyond Nowhere", explores life at the end of the earth. Turning the camera on myself, I reveal the destabilizing isolation of an individual in the icy North. In 2010, I was part of an art and science expedition in the high Arctic, traveling aboard a 2-masted schooner built in 1910. We cast off from a port 500 miles above the top of Europe and headed north. I was able to film in a frozen, deserted environment most would find unimaginable. While on shore, it was necessary to carry emergency flares and high-powered rifles for protection against polar bear attacks. I became certified to shoot firearms, which allowed me to travel independent of the group and fully experience the power of nature. The act of shooting off a flare became both an aggressive assertion of my presence and a cry for help that implied a condition of emergency. My efforts to either establish power or seek assistance failed as a thousand miles from civilization, I was too far north for anyone to see or respond to my act. In this classic human against nature equation, even efforts of sheer will fall short. By taking on the elements and the unknown, I found a kind of sublimity where time was destabilized by the power of nature. I had never felt so present in my life, but also so insignificant. Punctuated by echoing booms as flares explode, "Somewhere Beyond Nowhere" invites the viewer to experience both the thrill produced by a red-hot flare streaking across the frozen landscape and the isolation that this frigid and unrelenting environment evokes. Janet Biggs is known primarily for her work in video, photography and performance. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has captured such events as speeding motorcycles on the Bonneville Salt Flats, race horses galloping on treadmills, Olympic synchronized swimmers in their attempts to defy gravity, and kayaks performing a synchronized ballet in Arctic waters. Biggs received her undergraduate degree from Moore College of Art, and pursued graduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design. She has had solo exhibitions and film screenings at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montréal; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Tampa Museum of Art; Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; Mint Museum of Art; Everson Museum of Art; Gibbes Museum of Art; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Vantaa Art Museum, Finland; Linkopings Konsthall, Passagen, Sweden; the Oberosterreichisches Landesmuseum, Austria; and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Australia, among others. Reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, ArtForum, ARTNews, Art in America, Flash Art, Artnet.com, and many others. Biggs is the recipient of numerous grants including the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts Award, the Arctic Circle Fellowship/Residency, Art Matters, Inc., the Wexner Center Media Arts Program Residency, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the NEA Fellowship Award. Her work is in collections including the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL: the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, NC; and the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT. Janet Biggs is represented by CONNERSMITH., Washington, DC, and Winkleman Gallery, New York City. Aude Moreau Sugar Carpet The "Sugar Carpet" is one of my most significant and ambitious projects to date. It is comprised of two tons of refined white sugar evenly spread, carpet-like, across the floor, and then transformed, through the application of floral motifs, into a Persian rug. The pristine white expanse contrasts markedly with the industrial architecture of the site in which it lies. The highly fragile surface is vulnerable to visitors’ movements, requiring a consensus from the group in order to keep it intact. A tension is created between the fascination one experiences due to the materiality and sheer scale of the work, and the physical distance it imposes. Although it rises only minimally off the floor, occupying volumetrically but a small space, the "Sugar Carpet" reveals the void which contains it as well as amplifies the impact of the space itself. It also refers to another kind of void that is related to the process of refining raw materials. The adjective “refined” describes both the materials produced by industrial purification and the qualities of elegance and sophistication attributed to the objects and attitudes with which a culture chooses to represent itself. This process of selection, which operates as a surplus value in cultural and production spheres, obscures the historical violence often at work. Through the use of trompe-l’oeil, the Sugar Carpet refers back to our ambiguous adherence to a domestic comfort which systematically evacuates the realities of production. Aude Moreau’s practice is grounded in large-scale installations, ephemeral projects in public space, and most recently video. Moreau’s works highlight the “here and now” of the art object’s unique presence and are conceived to heighten the contextual relationships within the space itself, as well as augment the viewer’s experience of the site. These projects reflect her knowledge and understanding of formal issues in the treatment of space she acquired through stage design and her studies in the visual arts. Born in Gençay, France in 1969, Aude Moreau lives and works in Montreal. She has exhibited extensively both in Québec and in Europe, and has gained increasing attention in recent years, due in part to the attribution in 2011 of both the Powerhouse Prize and the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. Her work was included in the Prague Biennale in 2011, and in 2012, she exhibited at Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and at the Galerie de L’UQAM in the context of the Montreal/Brooklyn exchange organized by Centre Clark. Moreau’s solo exhibitions include Tirer le ciel at the Casino Luxembourg, Forum d’art contemporain in 2009, Sortir, presented during the Nuit Blanche de Montréal in 2010 and Sugar Carpet, created in 2008 at the Darling Foundry, Montréal, and at Orange événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe in 2006.