Transart Institute Faculty Exhibition 2008



BVOÖ Galerie
Landstrasse 31, A-4020, Linz
info[at]transartinstitute[dot]org

Hours: MON-FRI 16-18:00, SAT 10-12:00
Exhibition: July 14 - August 1, 2008
Openings: July 16, 23, 30, 20:00

July 14 - 19
Lynn Book
Thomas Helyar-Cardwell
Leon Johnson
Mary Ting

July 21 - 26
Ruth Bianco
Geoff Cox
Knoll+Cella

July 28 - August 1
Michael Bowdidge
Jean Marie Casbarian
Sophia Lycouris
Jeff Thompson


Lynn Book



Lynn Book has a venerable history of interdisciplinary artistic practice that traverses boundaries between performance art, dance, theater, language and new music forms. Critics from the New York Times and Village Voice have called her work “bold and inspired” and “strange and captivating“. Her performance work has received citations, fellowships, and awards in the U.S. from among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Franklin Furnace, and MacArthur Foundation funding. “RE:garding Next”, a collaborative culture project investigating utopian desire, premiered at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in the U.S. in 2007, with both an exhibition and multi media performance components with over 50 active participants. >> website


Thomas Helyar-Cardwell


Imperial Standard, sewn fabric, approx. 60x86", 2007

Thomas Helyar-Cardwell is a painter and maker based in London. His work addresses themes of historic symbolism and narrative in painting from a contemporary perspective. Influences such as the vanitas still life, medieval heraldy and Rococo styling find focus in a practice which uses devices of repetition and mirroring to create evocative tableaux exploring notions of luxury, mortality and nostalgia.

Recent exhibitions include 'Faith' Gallery Primo Alonso, London and Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax, 'Approaches to What?' Nunnery Gallery, London and Deutsche Postbank, London. He has taught at the University of Huddersfield, University College for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and Maidstone, and co-runs Maryland Studios, a non-profit arts organisation in East London. wn

Leon Johnson


Fortress/Boy/Bridge: my ear, a nautilus. Digital Video, 20 minutes, 2008.

Leon Johnson produces work in film, performance, and site-specific events. He has an active studio practice, is the proprietor of The Long Bell Press and a founding member of Creative Material Group, a new non-profit arts collective. He is the recipient of a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant for Painting and a Yaddo Residency Fellowship. His film FAUST/FAUSTUS IN DEPTFORD was selected for the KunstFilmBienale in Cologne, Germany and the Raindance Film Festival in London, UK. AFTER, a recent video, was published by Chiasmus Press last summer as part of The End of Reality, a DVD and fiction anthology. His new video project, FORTRESS BOY BRIDGE, was finished in 2007 during a Cuts + Burns Residency at The Outpost in Williamsburg. Leon is a recipient of the Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio and Theory in the Graduate Program at Maine College of Art.. >> website


Mary Ting



Mary Ting has a varied art practice of installation, drawing, photography and video. Layered with stories, glimpses of memories and cultural metaphors, her fragmented forms are both personal and allegorical. Mary Ting's artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad since 1986. She is the recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, Lower Eastside Printshop residency, Lambent Fellowship in the Arts, and a Pollack Krasner Foundation grant among numerous other awards and residencies. Mary currently teaches sculpture, drawing and bookarts for Pratt Manhattan and CUNY- John Jay College. She lives and works in New York City.

Ruth Bianco


Tourism.com: smoking butts from ashtrays, a video installation by Ruth Bianco and Richard Davies

In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx and Sal Paradise (Kerouac himself) travel erratically across the American continent in search of spiritual and sexual liberation. Moriarty’s character in particular is given special significance. Singled out as the catalyst of the group, forever in search of new and unlimited experiences, he is cast as a ‘liberated spirit’, a walking embodiment of free flowing Jazz, whose lines of expression are left to follow their own direction. Legitimizing a new and utopian form of ‘tourism’ - one that, ironically, emphasizes the dystopian underbelly of the ‘American Dream’ - On the Road was subsequently to become ‘the bible’ for a generation of hobos, drop-outs, beatniks, hippies, and bohemians. Kerouac offers an image of the road as a symbol of a restless endeavour, a means of inventing a new modality of self discovery (and also, albeit accidentally, new means of consumption).

Ruth Bianco and Richard Davies’ work presented here, entitled tourism.com - smoking butts from ashtrays, like Kerouac’s On the Road, deals with a stream of consciousness along with direct issues of travel and consumption. Drawing on footage shot on location in Malta, the United Kingdom, China, Belgium and Spain, it offers a broad mix of diverging images overlaid with a voice-over of Kerouac’s iconic text. Unlike Kerouac in On the Road however, it also speaks directly of the cultural and geographical scarring produced by tourism, and the resultant slippages within the landscape.

Recent research undertaken by the UNWTO (United Nations World Tourist Organization) in recording and highlighting the negative effects of tourism on natural habitats - both in Europe and throughout the world - forecasts a bleak future. Once beautiful and natural habitats are now compromised or lost altogether due to rampant strains of commercialism and capitalist gain. Such gain, paradoxically, is also cited as vital in maintaining the economic stability of the places and sites most openly affected.

tourism.com, thus, is precisely not a celebration of tourism (a travel guide of hotspots for the cultural elite). It is rather a warning, a witness to the unlimited effects of commercialism, of a restless migration (first evidenced during the 18th century with the ‘grand tour’) which is now changing, irrevocably, the face of the world in which we move.

Ruth Bianco's work has been informed by issues of “territory” and transboundary movement as a way to respond to questions of dislocation and deterritorialisation. Her materials can be looked upon as “processes”, seeking threads of connections in the boundaries between information and transformation. Her practice involves digital and combined media, video, installation, photography, print and drawing. She received art training in Malta and the UK pursuing an MA in Fine Art followed by a fellowship and PhD award in Fine Art from the University College for the Creative Arts, Kent, UK. Her formal education includes English Literature at the University of London and postgraduate studies in Education and Diplomatic Relations at the University of Malta. She is involved in international practice and her professional roles include: Visiting Lecturer and Personal Supervisor on the MA/MFA (International Practice) Fine Art programmes at the University College for Creative Arts, Kent, UK, and Visiting Lecturer in the undergraduate art education programme at the University of Malta. Ruth lives and works in Malta. >> website


Geoff Cox


'Hallo Welt!' (source code extract)

Geoff Cox has a research interest in 'software art'. Geoff co-curated the touring exhibition 'Generator' in collaboration with Spacex Gallery, and 'Vivaria.net' that asks the question 'why look at artificial animals?'. He co-organised (with Joasia Krysa) two conferences: 'globalica: artistic and conceptual tensions in the new world disorder' as part of the WRO biennial, Poland, and 'artist as engineer', as part of an Arts Council of England initiative around socially-engaged arts practice. >> website


Knoll+Cella


Wat Gate Museum, Chiang Mai, c-print 50x60cm, 2008

Working mainly in post-documentary photography and video, but also in experimental film and with architectural projections, our practice is driven by curiosity, longing, and questions of cultural identity. Many projects share an attention to the built environment, specifically temporary architecture and ideas about the use of space. Current projects “Natural Setting” and “Inside Out” grapple with temporal possibilities of architecture in different ways, found and constructed respectively. Recent projects “Insomnia” and “Tokaido” ask questions about otherness and belonging. All work gravitates toward the in-between and the temporary, whether it is a search for the meaning or location of home/heimat or the practice of living in liminality. We use recording as a means of connecting, permission and reflection, creating documentation which only becomes evidence, though inconclusive, over time. Projects coexist over a number of years.

Klaus Knoll has work in the collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris; National Austrian Fine Art Photography Collection, and jointly with Cella in the the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg. Exhibitions at the Tokyo Shinjuku Nikon Salon, Berlin Brennpunkt/DGPh; Alfred Lowenherz Gallery, New York; and with Cella at the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg and the Art Complex Museum in Boston. He holds a PhD in Literature and Communication, University of Salzburg, Austria. She holds an MFA in New Media and Cultural Studies, Vermont College. >> website


Michael Bowdidge


Duet-Jouet, 2005

Michael Bowdidge has been a practicing artist since 1989. His current practice makes use of found materials at a variety of scales ranging from small wall pieces to large-scale site-specific installations. Recent exhibitions and projects include: TOTAL KUNST Gallery, Edinburgh, Process(ion) at Slumgothic, Gainsborough, 1851 gallery, Nottingham and RED Gallery, Hull. He is currently undertaking doctoral research with Prof. John Newling at Nottingham Trent University. >> website


Jean Marie Casbarian


"Cutting Into the Memory Hole" Performance May 2008

Jean Marie Casbarian is an interdisciplinary installation artist who incorporates photography, film and video projections, sound, sculpture and performance into her artworks. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York in the year 2000. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the City Colleges of Chicago. Along with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Jean Marie has received a number of awards and artist residencies including The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, the Chicago Artist’s Assistance Project Grant, and a yearlong Associateship with The Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Currently, she resides in the Pioneer Valley where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film, Video, and Photography Department at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. >> website


Sophia Lycouris


Rite of Spring

Sophia Lycouris is an artist and academic researcher with background in dance, choreography and performance, currently interested in the dynamics of space, and urban space in particular. She holds a PhD in movement improvisation from the University of Surrey (UK), has been a post-doctoral research fellow in interdisciplinary choreography at the Nottingham Trent University (UK), and was recently appointed director of the Graduate Research School at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. Her explorations include the use of movement-related composition techniques on media other than the dancing/human body, to create ‘choreographic environments’ which can be shared experientially by the viewer. She works both individually and collaboratively, has performed with a range of improvisational performance groups between 1995 and 2003, has run her own company KUNSTWERK-BLEND between 1997 and 2003 and most recently started collaborating with architects, engineers, product designers and social scientists in long-term interdisciplinary projects.>> website


Jeff Thompson


Performance July 23, 20:00 BV Gallery

Jeff Thompson currently lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art in 2006. Jeff’s work uses similes, amplification, distillation, and chaotic systems to build sculpture, sound, and performance works. Materials are not transformed, but are surfaces of potential. Layering and sifting systems are used by which small bits are organized in a way that is at once ecological, poetic, and conceptual. Scintillations found in macro experience are amplified within a chaotic system. Subtle chance variations are made manifest. Thompson has exhibited his work in the US and internationally, most recently at Hogar Collection Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Ohio State University Gallery in Columbus, OH; and Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, NC. Among various awards received, Thompson was selected for the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art at the Weisman Museum of Art, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and a collaborative project with Dispatx.com. His sound work is currently traveling with SoundLab, which has been exhibited at museums and galleries in Palestine, Italy, Poland, and Argentina. >>website