12 March – 3 April, 1999
Exhibition
Reception: Friday, March 12, 6-8 PM
The Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce Spin, an exhibition by Los Angeles artist, Skip Arnold. Following his solo exhibition at the gallery in 1997 entitled Evidentiary Files, Skip takes his macro-survey and focuses it into a micro-examination for Spin. Spin is the evolution of a piece that Skip originally performed in New York at the Jack Tilton Gallery. In the piece, Skip spins continuously underneath a ceiling fan. Presented together for the first time, original studio studies, mylar prints, larger that life cibachromes, and enlarged film strips, all capture different facets of one deceptively simple action. In them, Skip is boyish, reenacting childhood’s first deliberate act to coerce an altered consciousness. Here, he is the comic mad professor, illustrating the effects of centripetal force on the human body. Here, Skip is a whirling dervish.
As in all his performances and documentations, Skip presents an analysis of exhaustive lengths. What at first glance may appear to be a case study in obsessive extremes becomes a deliberation upon the unexpected ecstatic results of a repeated gesture. In two cibachromes, Skip is fragmented into three separate parts. Time, the decay of revolution, dissects a body from itself. Meanwhile, the pursuit of a mind/body/spirit collaboration persists. By presenting a quantified investigation of this singular action, Skip conveys a rational celebration of the absurd, a pragmatic commemoration of the everyday deeds that comprise a lifetime.
Artist Bio
In addition to a Guggenheim fellowship in which he used an experimental speed boat to navigate the Bermuda Triangle, (1995), Arnold received a National Endowment for the Arts award (1993) and the Brodie Arts Foundation Fellowship for Performance (1992). Most recently, he had been included in the “Sunshine Noir” exhibit that originated from the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark and in “The Body: Expression/Impression,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Other museums that Skip Arnold has exhibited include The New Museum for Contemporary Art, The Long Beach Museum and the Newport Harbor Museum. He has exhibited extensively in Europe including Wienner Secession, Vienna Austria, the Montenay Giroux Gallery, Paris, France, Art in Public, Geneva and Basel.