Mary Ellen Carroll: Federal, State, County and City (California Dreamin’)
Exhibition Dates: March 7 – May 26, 2012
Opening Reception: March 8, 2012 6-8pm
Third Streaming and the Museum of the Moving Image are pleased to announce the screening of FEDERAL, a 24-hour, two theater movie by artist Mary Ellen Carroll that will be screened at the Museum of the Moving Image from 9am on Saturday, March 17th to 9am on Sunday, March 18th, 2012.
In conjunction with the screening of the film, FEDERAL, Third Streaming is proud to present the exhibition Mary Ellen Carroll: Federal, State, County and City, that will include the work Federal, a never seen before series of black and white photographs taken of the front of the Federal Building with a medium format portrait camera, every hour on the hour. There will also be three new series of works exhibited, State, County and City.
FEDERAL features the The Federal Building located at 11000 Wilshire in Los Angeles, designed in 1969 by the architect Charles Luckman, and was shot in Los Angeles from 9am on July 28th, 2003 to 9am the following day. It is not a film about the building as celebrated icon, however, nor is it an interpretation of the, at the time, ‘au courant’ political theory. FEDERAL is the articulation of an image of what is legally, socially and politically non-representable, but is understood as an omnipresent invisible structure.
The film evolved out of a series that Carroll started in 1990 when she began to photograph every federal building in the United States. The events of 9/11 and security measures ended this photo series, and the decision was made to continue Federal by shooting the 24 hour, two sided movie about The Federal Building in Los Angeles, the western headquarters of the US Government. As ‘a day in the life‘, the movie utilizes the temporal to expand the still image into the filmic. The chance to watch either side of the building gives the appearance of a freedom of choice, yet in the end mirrors the same set of restrictions that go unnoticed in the public domain. The government’s complicity and willingness to be filmed over 24 hours is a fundamental aspect of Carroll’s process to engage the subject to become the object.
Carroll as a conceptual artist has been investigating a single, fundamental question: what do we consider a work of art? The results are a multifarious, provocative and often wry outpouring in performance, theatre, architecture, writing, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture and painting.
Carroll lives and works in NYC and Houston, Texas. She is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including, most recently, a 2010 Graham Foundation Fellowship for prototype 180 and Innovation Territories and the AIA’s Artist of the Year Award. She has also received a Pollack/Krasner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She received the Pennies from Heaven Fund for her work that is advanced, experimental, and socially visionary. Her work has been exhibited at numerous American and international galleries including the Whitney Museum-New York, ICA-Philadelphia, the Renaissance Society-Chicago, ICA-London, Museum für Völkerkunde-Munich, MOMUK-Vienna. Her work belongs to numerous public and private collections as well. A monograph of her work, published by SteidlMACK (London and Gottingen), received the AIGA’s 2010 Book of the Year Award. Carroll teaches architecture at Rice University.
FEDERAL was created with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship that Carroll received in 2003, and with technical and material contributions by the Panasonic Corporation, Outpost Digital and Michael Isabell of Eyespy Films.
This will be Mary Ellen Carroll’s second exhibition at Third Streaming.
artists: Mary Ellen Carroll