Dominque
Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia Abstraction Valley Artists
in residence
1 October 1999 - 31 October 1999
While in
residency, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia began principle
production on their collaborative film Abstraction Valley. The
film will be screened by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions upon
its completion in Fall 2000. During their recidency the artists
gave presentations on their individual bodies of work and collaborations
at Art Center College of Design, the Santa Monica Museum of Art,
and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The project
of Abstraction Valley is one of psycho-geographical explorations.
Gonzalez-Foerster and Leccia utilized the intrinsically abstract
elements of the South-Western dessert landscape to create constructed
territories that seek to reflect, or rather create, the substance
of the "characters." Although the scenery is recognizable
in the tradition of romantic isolation and desolation, the places
Gonzalez-Foerster and Leccia reference are everywhere and nowhere,
interior and exterior.
Both Ange
Leccia and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster have used cinema and cinematic
principles in earlier works. Gonzalez-Foerster has constructed installations
that function cinematically, as they set a stage for the unfolding
of psychological and emotional dramas. Leccia has used huge video
projections to both intervene with the architecture of the gallery
and to tell the stories of personal and public dramas. Both artists
also explore conventions of narrative structure, using imagery rendered
in film and installation to offer fragments of information about
personal and shared histories. They have already collaborated on
the short film "Ile de Beaute" (1996), which combined a written
scenario with selections from the hundreds of hours filmed by Leccia
in the previous ten years. Writing and editing that film lead to
the artists' realization that the film they wanted to write and
shoot completely was Abstraction Valley.
Work by
Ange Leccia has appeared all over France and in U.S. venues such
as the High Museum in Atlanta, the CAM in Houston and Inova in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has also exhibited widely,
having been included in the recent Sydney Biennial and in numerous
group and solo exhibitions in France and around the world. "Ile
de Beaute" has been screened in all over France and Europe, including
Grenoble, , Lyon, London, Brussels, Geneva, and Kyoto in Japan.