0 to 60 contemporary art exhibition brings together modern masterworks that explore the concept of time

RALEIGH, NC.- Beginning March 24, 2013, the North Carolina Museum of Art, in partnership with Penland School of Crafts, presents 0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art, an exhibition looking at how contemporary artists blur the boundaries among art, craft, and design, and how they incorporate elements from science, engineering, robotics, computer software, and gaming technology to explore the concept of time. The works in 0 to 60 fall into six categories—real time, virtual time, historical time, recorded time, manipulated time, and the passage of time—and each approaches the theme from a different perspective. The exhibition features 17 new works as well as four pieces from the Museum’s robust contemporary art collection, including two newly acquired works, on view for the first time, and Bill Viola’s iconic video The Quintet of Remembrance.

0 to 60, conceived by NCMA Chief Curator Linda Dougherty and Penland’s Director Jean McLaughlin, will be on view until August 11 and features works by 32 diverse, acclaimed artists who work in a wide range of mediums, including Walead Beshty, Jim Campbell, Paul Chan, Tara Donovan, John Gerrard, Tim Hawkinson, Hoss Haley, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Beth Lipman, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jennifer Steinkamp, Do Ho Suh, Vera Lutter, and Bill Viola. Many of the featured artists have studied or taught at Penland School of Crafts.

“0 to 60 explores time, a theme that has recently emerged in many artists’ work,” said NCMA Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art Linda Dougherty. “Focusing on the concept of time and its influence on art, the exhibition looks at how time is used as form, content, and material, and how art is used to represent, evoke, manipulate, or transform time. It’s especially notable to have Penland involved in the exhibition, since ‘time’ is one of the critical resources their facilities provide for the artists who come to the school for a creative retreat where they can work literally around the clock.”

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Year’s Midnight, 2011, HD plasma screen, computer, camera, and face-tracking and fluid-dynamic software, 55 x 31 1/2 x 4 3/4 in., North Carolina Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Hanes in honor of Dr. Emily Farnham and Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, and with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest), by exchange, © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid; Photo: Antimodular Research.

“Our contemporary art collection is one of North Carolina’s cultural gems,” said Lawrence J. Wheeler, director of the North Carolina Museum of Art. “We are committed to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art, and 0 to 60 offers a unique opportunity to do that by drawing on our ties to Penland School of Crafts—which has been an incubator for so many wonderful artists from our state—and the relationships we have with artists who are excited to create new work for our exhibition. As North Carolina’s art museum, we make it our mission to introduce audiences to the evolving face of art and showcase works by many of the brightest names in contemporary art. Expanding on a theme often seen in work from around the globe, we will be doing just that.”

Eight artists are creating new works for 0 to 60 that respond to the exhibition’s themes through a range of mediums. One of these works, Forest for the Chairs, created by Penland resident artist Tom Shields, will be on view in the Museum Park, a 164-acre art park that surrounds the NCMA’s buildings. Shields’s work is a sculpture made of trees and found wooden chairs, which will be installed and allowed to decay over time as a comment on the cyclical nature of the natural world.

For the Penland component of the exhibition, Dan Bailey, Kyoung Ae Cho, Alison Collins, and Anne Lemanski will be in residency at the School, where they will create site-specific installations that will be on view at Penland for the duration of the exhibition. Dan Bailey will create a collage of low-altitude aerial photographs of the Penland campus, taken over the course of several seasons, which he will collage onto a satellite image of the same area. This work will serve as a partner to a similar piece composed of images of the NCMA campus that will be on view for the Museum’s run of the exhibition.

Exhibition Highlights
Works in 0 to 60 explore how artists use time as art, how art can reference time through motif, and how the presence of time affects art and artists. Featured artists use materials as diverse as glass, gold, paper cups, toothpicks, 3D-digital animation, and video-surveillance software to create works of art that present time from new perspectives. The scheduling of the exhibition itself plays with the notion of time, as 0 to 60 will be on view simultaneously at the NCMA in Raleigh and across the state in the Blue Ridge Mountains at Penland School of Crafts, which will feature a series of installations by four artists in the exhibition.

Real Time
Works in this category document or represent the actual time during which the process or event of making the art occurred. Highlights include:

• Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong performance project Punching the Time Clock, in which Hsieh recorded every hour of every day for an entire year. This work is one of a series of year-long projects Hsieh undertook during the 1970s and ‘80s.

• John Gerrard’s real-time digital animation, Oil Stick Work, now in progress, in which a camera captures a worker painting a one-square meter section of a barn each day. 0 to 60 will include a live feed of the work, which will take an estimated 30 years to complete.

• A multimedia installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that will use custom-made software, sensors, and projectors to incorporate viewers’ heartbeats and fingerprints into an immersive digital work of art and a monumental group portrait.

Passage of Time
The following works address and imply the passage of time. Several artists deal directly with the process of time in their labor-intensive methods of creation.

• Tim Hawkinson’s idiosyncratic and fully functioning clocks are made out of common materials including candles, banana peels, and medicine cabinets. They comment on our modern culture’s obsessive need to know the time.

• Richard Hughes’s fractured clock sculpture Untitled (Triptick) frustrates and prevents the telling of time by overlapping multiple analog clocks.

• Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) calls attention to the passing of time as two identical, battery-operated functioning clocks—placed side by side and initially set to exactly the same time—inevitably fall out of sync, representing the unpredictable (a)synchronicity of two lovers.

• Lisa Hoke’s monumental site-specific installation is made out of thousands of painted plastic cups and recycled cardboard packaging and will be created on site at the NCMA over the course two weeks.

Manipulated Time
The artists in this category use extreme slow-motion, video digital animation, and other techniques to speed up and otherwise influence and distort our sense of time.

• From the Museum’s permanent collection, Bill Viola’s video The Quintet of Remembrance shows a one-minute shot of five mourning people slowed down to play over 15 1/2 minutes.

• Jennifer Steinkamp’s video uses digital animation to fast forward time, clycling through an entire year in a few minutes. Her large-scale video installation Mike Kelley is on permanent and central display in the Museum’s new Tom Phifer–designed West Building.

Historical Time
In this category the artists re-create or subvert historical time, transporting the viewer to another place.

• Beth Lipman’s elaborate glass sculpture Bride refers to still-life paintings throughout art history and plays off the still life’s symbolic reference to the transience of life and the passage of time.

• Anne Lemanski’s A Century of Hair, 1900–1990 is a witty, pointed sculptural commentary offered by a series of sculpted iconic hairstyles representing each decade of the 20th century.