19 Jan 2011

Hyde Park Art Center: 'The Precession' by Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey

The Precession
An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem
Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey
The Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery

Inspired by history, astronomy and new media sources, The Precession combines digital images, text and performance art into a monumental exploration of labor and the night sky. The concept was developed after the artists visited the Hoover Dam and saw the Oskar J.W. Hansen sculpture, 'The Winged Figures of the Republic' and the celestial floor map that is a part of the public art work. The exhibition is comprised of three elements; a time-based digital projection on the Hyde Park Art Center's 10 screen façade, a floor installation by Claire Ashley and a live performance presented three times during the month of March 2011. Content for the projection will stream from a custom built website that combines local Twitter feeds, original and borrowed texts and blue -screened video. Similar to the movement of the stars, details of the projection will vary slightly with each viewing. The exhibition is laced with a multitude of historical and contemporary allusions including the choreography of Busby Berkley, 'The Grapes of Wrath', Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the geometric designs of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. These seemingly cacophonous elements flow together representing the interrelationships between architecture, dreams, sustainability and futurity.

Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery are a collaborative merging digital literary practices and performance. Their work primarily comes in the form visual, textual and choreographic art. The two evolve their work through context-specific research and practice that gives consideration to the constraints of a given venue or occasion, including performance, exhibition, and production space, as well as the local community and [online] textual activity happening within the locale. Thus, a given piece is a body of material that may have no singular fixed form but is alternately or simultaneously presented as internet art, durational live installation or a performance of fixed length.

The artists themselves offer a unique union of artistic talents. With a background rooted in writing and technology, Morrissey uses computer code to remix, visualize, and animate his texts on the web while also collecting data from online sources. Jeffery uses a memory, a site, or a sampled text or image as source material to generate movement and construct images activating the body and installed objects. In the collision of these individual practices, physical and virtual sites and audiences are of equal importance.

'Our work attempts to engage the flux of contemporary, networked culture and to contain a complex diversity of material within rigorously defined forms and structures. We are interested in a variety of contexts, instances, and interruptions for the work to evolve and be staged as it moves towards something like completion across multiple platforms.'

---- Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey