Anne Eastman  “Seen from Elsewhere”

September 14 – October:      Anne Eastman “Seen from Elsewhere”
opens September 14, 19-21h.

Lisa Ruyter is pleased to inaugurate her new art space • with an installation by New York City based artist Anne Eastman, titled “Seen from Elsewhere.”

Anne Eastman makes and uses image-capturing devices. Mobiles, mirrors, video projections, and sculptural objects are arranged to provide fleeting visual displacements. Patterned fabrics and design elements become surrogates for place, culture and time.

Handheld photos of the moon become classic sculptor’s drawings, a meditation about space, material and the artist’s hand. The strange atmosphere of a barely missed lightning bolt reveals a banal landscape with an extraterrestrial aura highlighted by the simple fact of a chance encounter. In both sets of photographs, specific light images become purely subjective, yet not individuated mark making.

Anne Eastman’s project questions artistic identity, an inversion of Richard Serra’s “Hand Catching Lead.” Through the use of mirrors in her videos, lived space becomes flattened and dislocated, a collage of random glances, aligned more with Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements than with the spectacle of materiality.

Anne Eastman (b. 1973, based in New York City) studied sculpture at Yale and Cultural Anthropology at Smith College. She has presented solo exhibitions at ATM Gallery in New York, and with Groeflin Maag Galerie who also featured her at LISTE 08 in Basel. Anne Eastman a founding member of B’L’ing, an art collective that screens and trades bootleg video art and rare media. In addition to maintaining her studio in New York, Anne Eastman spends a lot of time in Nikko, Japan, where her parents live. This exhibition was produced this summer during a • residency in Vienna.

• is the name of artist Lisa Ruyter’s new art space in Vienna, Austria. Artists and other cultural agents are invited to interact with Vienna, to develop projects in response, not always in the form of an exhibition. Performances, printed matter and perhaps more will come out of this residency program. Additionally, local artists will draw a spotlight, with an emphasis on emerging artists who are preparing to enter the commercial gallery scene. While • does not represent artists, guidance, advice and continuing support will be offered.