October 1 – 31, 1999
Abstraction Valley Artists in residence
1 October 1999 – 31 October 1999
While in residency, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia began principle production on their collaborative film Abstraction Valley. The film will be screened by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions upon its completion in Fall 2000. During their residency the artists gave presentations on their individual bodies of work and collaborations at Art Center College of Design, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The project of Abstraction Valley is one of psycho-geographical explorations. Gonzalez-Foerster and Leccia utilized the intrinsically abstract elements of the South-Western dessert landscape to create constructed territories that seek to reflect, or rather create, the substance of the “characters.” Although the scenery is recognizable in the tradition of romantic isolation and desolation, the places Gonzalez-Foerster and Leccia reference are everywhere and nowhere, interior and exterior.
Both Ange Leccia and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster have used cinema and cinematic principles in earlier works. Gonzalez-Foerster has constructed installations that function cinematically, as they set a stage for the unfolding of psychological and emotional dramas. Leccia has used huge video projections to both intervene with the architecture of the gallery and to tell the stories of personal and public dramas. Both artists also explore conventions of narrative structure, using imagery rendered in film and installation to offer fragments of information about personal and shared histories. They have already collaborated on the short film “Ile de Beaute” (1996), which combined a written scenario with selections from the hundreds of hours filmed by Leccia in the previous ten years. Writing and editing that film lead to the artists’ realization that the film they wanted to write and shoot completely was Abstraction Valley.
Work by Ange Leccia has appeared all over France and in U.S. venues such as the High Museum in Atlanta, the CAM in Houston and Inova in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has also exhibited widely, having been included in the recent Sydney Biennial and in numerous group and solo exhibitions in France and around the world. “Ile de Beaute” has been screened in all over France and Europe, including Grenoble, Lyon, London, Brussels, Geneva, and Kyoto in Japan.
