The Connective Corridor, in collaboration with Light Work, has announced the next round of installations for the Urban Video Project, which will be on view at all three sites from April through June. The curators for this selection of work are Blake Carrington, Christopher Gianunzio and Colin Todd, collectively known as Avalanche Collective.

Carrington, Gianunzio and Todd are the co-founders of the Urban Video Project. Avalanche Collective navigates contemporary urban space and systems through the historical lens of a polar expedition. Using performance and sculpture, the group creates scenarios where anachronistic and modern forms of spatial exploration collide. Everyday spaces become theaters for the romantic and obsolete.

Their selections for UVP include:

MONROE SITE (April 1–June 30)
333 E. Onondaga St.
Trevor Paglen, “Code Names.” Video projection.

Trevor Paglen’s “Code Names” exists as a list of words, phrases and terms that designate classified military programs. These include classified exercises and units, intelligence programs, information compartments and Pentagon “Special Access Programs.” Installed in downtown Syracuse, “Code Names” functions as a meditation on language and advertising whose product is foreign to the general population. The contents of the piece become metaphors for the unknown and ask the audience to ponder what exactly they mean.

Paglen is an artist, writer and experimental geographer whose work deliberately blurs lines between social science, contemporary art, journalism and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched, ways to see and interpret the world around us. His visual work has been exhibited at Transmediale Festival, Berlin; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the 2008 Taipei Biennial; and the Istanbul Biennial 2009. It has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, Modern Painters, Aperture and Art Forum. Paglen has received grants and commissions from Rhizome.org, Art Matters, Artadia and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. He is the author of three books and holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. in geography from UC Berkeley. Paglen lives and works in Oakland, Calif., and New York City.

ONONDAGA HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION SITE (April 1–30)
321 Montgomery St.
Jill Magid, “Trust” (17 min., 44 sec.) and “Final Tour” (3 min.). Video projection with sound, pieces shown one after another.

For the “Evidence Locker” series, Jill Magid utilizes the complex surveillance systems in Liverpool, England, to speak about the limits of communication and control. “Final Tour” finds the audience following Magid and a friend through the city of Liverpool as seen through surveillance cameras. In “Trust,” Magid relies on communication with the police officers operating surveillance cameras to literally guide her through the city as she walks the streets with her eyes blindfolded. “Trust” and “Final Tour” are manifestations of a collaboration with the Liverpool police department. When projected in downtown Syracuse, the context and meaning of the work shifts from private to public, commenting on our inability to be truly alone.

Magid’s work transgresses common notions of art’s boundaries. She experiments with all media, literature and experience to communicate her questioning of the world around us. She received a B.F.A. from Cornell University and an M.S. in visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Modern in London, Gagosian Gallery in New York, Centre D’arte Santa Monica in Barcelona, Sparwasser in Berlin and Stroom, and the AVID (The Secret Service of the Netherlands), among other locations. She now lives and works in New York and Amsterdam.

ONONDAGA HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION SITE (May 1–30)
321 Montgomery St.
Miranda Lichtenstein, “Trance Dance” (5 min., 34 sec.) and “Everything Begins and Ends in Exactly the Right Time and Place” (9 min., 5 sec.). Video projection with sound, pieces shown one after another.

Searching, misrepresentation, failure and our troubled relationship to the natural world are components of Miranda Lichtenstein’s work. “Trance Dance” is a series of videos authored during various public events, yet it is not completely clear whether or not the events are engineered by the artist. What is clear is the strange environment that is revealed—a kind of cultish event with a very otherworldly soundtrack. When “Trance Dance” is viewed in public, its meaning shifts from one of an intense, almost spiritual experience to one of voyeurism. “Everything Begins and Ends at Exactly The Right Time and Place” comes from a similar place of spirituality. The video finds its protagonist wandering through a forest that seems to be unending. The juxtaposition of the urban setting of the projection with the lush forest in the video creates a new context to experience Lichtenstein’s videos.

Lichtenstein received an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; Stadthaus Ulm, Germany; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Gallery Min Min, Tokyo; and Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles. She was a recipient of The Giverny Residency Program and Fellowship, Claude Monet Foundation, Giverny, France. Lichtenstein lives and works in New York.

ONONDAGA HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION SITE (June 1–30)
321 Montgomery St.
Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, “Several Interruptions” (3 min., 44 sec.). Video projection with sound.

“Several Interruptions,” which collages many online videos in which people are seen holding their breath underwater, is both interruption (as its name suggests) as well as documentary, in which the seemingly mundane and numerous has been made into something unique and original.

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead have chosen, from some 61,000 files on YouTube, videos that they have edited together into brief vignettes, which interrupt each other sequentially and laterally. When projected outside, the contents of “Several Interruptions” ask the audience to skirt the line between public and private space. The installation functions as a cross-section of contemporary existence pulled from the privacy of laptops and reinterpreted in the public setting.

Thomson and Craighead are artists living and working in London. They make artworks and installations for galleries, online and sometimes outdoors. Much of their recent work looks at live networks like the web and how they are changing the way we all understand the world around us. Having both studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Thomson now lectures part time at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Craighead is a senior researcher at the University of Westminster and lectures in fine art at Goldsmiths University. They have exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, V2 Rotterdam, Neuberger Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bitforms in New York, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival and the New Museum in New York, among others.

Written by  Jessica Heckman • (315) 443-1300