Sculpture: Deadly Sins (Snowglobes), Pure Products USA, by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, Eyebeam Open Studios Fall 2009 / 20091023.10D.55556.P1.L1.C23 / SML
Image by See-ming Lee ??? SML
See also video interview with the artist (Flickr HD video).
Deadly Sins
A new collectible, slated to set the mark as an icon for the 22nd Century – collect all Seven Deadly Sins. Due out by December in an exclusive limited edition set.
Pure Products USA | Ligorano/Reese Collaboration in Art
Towards a Surreal Politik…
In 1992, we began Pure Products of America as a series of multiple editions focusing on the impact of marketing on politics. Over the past 17 years, the series has expanded and now includes 14 pieces running the gamut from snow globes to underwear (our underwear was the first to pack a political message), to happy meals.
Each object is signed and numbered in various sized editions. When we introduce Pure Products, we send some of them as gifts to government officials. Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton, members of the Supreme Court and various Senators and Congressional representatives have all received a pure product at one time or another.
Pure Products also function as discreet elements in installations. The installations The Bible Belt, Pillars of the Clean Order, and Steel Nipples incorporated them in sculptural settings with video and other media. In 2001, we expanded on this idea with the inauguration of an online retail website as part of the project.
Each piece is grounded within a framework that satirizes political values and, often, lampoons morality. Some pure products, like Line Up and Contract with America underwear, became media sensations, reported in the press, on television and radio. The commentary surrounding the artwork is a mixture of absurdity and culture jamming, amplifying how much the media interprets and misinterprets contemporary art and blurs the connections between art, activism and commerce.
ligoranoreese.net/pure-products-usa
Bio
NORA LIGORANO and MARSHALL REESE have collaborated together as Ligorano/Reese since the early 80’s. They use collaboration to blend diverse talents into a singular voice and vision. In the process of creating their work, their individual contributions cross and criss-cross between each other from brainstorming to realizing and making the art on location or in the studio.
They use unusual materials and industrial processes to make their limited edition multiples, videos, sculptures and installations, moving easily from dish towels, underwear, and snow globes, to electronic art and computer controlled interactive installations.
They take and manipulate images, audio and text from old media: print, television, radio and combine that with the new: internet and mobile telecommunications. Their pursuit is an ongoing investigation into the impact of technology on culture and the associations and meanings that the media brings to images, language and speech in politics.
They have an interest with using open forms to involve community interaction, like their drawing contests, Crater Bay Area for the 01 Festival in San Jose and Crater New York at Location1. Installations that combine sculpture with public participation in drawing, within the context of a contest that is also streamed on the internet and in Second Life. Their ice sculptures, “Main Street Meltdown” and “The State of Things” share that same sense of open possibility, fusing natural processes of erosion and decay as flexible durations and markers to determine the experience of the work.
Many of their sculptures and installations reinterpret and reexamine older forms of technology – using objects that signify truth, authority and manifest cultural historicity. Ligorano/Reese use mirrors, clocks, metronomes and medieval codex bindings and combine them with video screens. They have invented micro-projection systems to display films on the head of a pin or the counterweight of a metronome.
Since 2004, they’ve investigated portraiture as a construct of social representation. Line Up (2004-5), their series of portraits of Bush administration officials in mug shot, acknowledges that the mug shot is the preeminent form of portraiture now that more people are incarcerated in the U.S. than any other country in the world. In December, 2007, the exhibition of these photos at the New York Public Library caused a firestorm of controversy with heavy rotation on FoxNews, DrudgeReport’s homepage and many, many other publications.
In 2001, they launched www.pureproductsusa.com, the online retail website for their infamous political art series the Pure Products of America. Since 1992, Ligorano/Reese have made 11 multiples in signed editions of 3 to 100. They are best selling editions at Printed Matter, artbook@ps1 and the New Museum store and have prompted, at least on one occasion, the RNC to threaten them with copyright infringement.
For more information see “The Joy of Collaborating: recipes for time-based art.”
ligoranoreese.net/about
Eyebeam Open Studios: Fall 2009
eyebeam.org/events/open-studios-fall-2009
Eyebeam is pleased to host Open Studios for its 2009 Senior Fellows, Resident Artists, and Student Residents at Eyebeam’s state-of-the-art design, research, and fabrication studio; showcasing video performance, wearable technologies, code and humor, party technology, and sustainablity design.
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Eyebeam is the leading not-for-profit art and technology center in the United States.
Founded in 1996 and incorporated in 1997, Eyebeam was conceived as a non-profit art and technology center dedicated to exposing broad and diverse audiences to new technologies and media arts, while simultaneously establishing and demonstrating new media as a significant genre of cultural production.
Since then, Eyebeam has supported more than 130 fellowships and residencies for artists and creative technologists; we’ve run an active education program for youth, artists’ professional development and community outreach; and have mounted an extensive series of public programs, over recent years approximately 4 exhibitions and 40 workshops, performances and events annually.
Today, Eyebeam offers residencies and fellowships for artists and technologists working in a wide range of media. At any given time, there are up to 20 resident artists and fellows onsite at Eyebeam’s 15,000-square foot Chelsea offices and Labs, developing new projects and creating work for open dissemination through online, primarily open-source, publication as well as a robust calendar of public programming that includes free exhibitions, lectures and panels, participatory workshops, live performances and educational series.
eyebeam.org
