Asheville Art Museum Presents a Juried Exhibition of New Media Art

The Asheville Art Museum is pleased to present Prime Time: Third Annual New Media Juried Exhibition, on view through August 2, 2015.

Artists from across North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia responded to a call to artists in December 2014 and submitted their work for Prime Time: Third Annual New Media Juried Exhibition. Fourteen finalists, at various stages in their careers, were chosen for inclusion by a jury. Played in a 53-minute loop, the works featured in Prime Time highlight a variety of approaches to single channel, screen-based new media, including stop action and hand-drawn animation, experimental narrative film, digital décollage and performance-based video.

Since the late-20th century, new media art has become an innovative and integral part of the contemporary art world. New media artists use technologies to create works that explore different ideas and aspects of artistic expression. These new technologies include computers, information and communications technology, virtual or immersive environments, sound engineering and more. They are the brushes and pens of these artists.

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Two works in the selection are performance-based. Patricia Earnhardt’s Perfected confronts our society’s obsession with youthful appearances by using transparent tape to reconstruct and reimagine her face. In Shelf Space, Mika Agari draws attention to the spaces of consumer culture by disrupting the conventional order and flow in a common grocery store. Some videos rely on the artist’s hand, as in Oy Vey TV by Michael Siporin Levine, which showcases the artist’s talent in printmaking and hand-drawn animation. Other works borrow imagery from pre-existing sources and at times manipulate it to create new meaning. In Blazo Kovacevic’s work Probe, the artist captures airport security screening footage and shares it with an art-going public, posing questions about privacy, personal freedom and the capacity for beauty and abstraction in everyday x-ray technology. Eric Juth’s iWash (October 2014) juxtaposes screen recordings taken from Internet browsing sessions and peels away layers of visual information to create a mesmerizing montage of color and pattern that resembles an Abstract Expressionist painting. A number of works are narrative in nature, telling stories of characters both real and imagined. While Joel Tauber’s Pumping imagines a new history of Los Angeles in the age of trains, Erin Colleen Johnson’s Hole tells the artist’s story of reaching out to an ice fisherman in Minnesota to recreate the magic of ice fishing in her own surroundings. As a whole, these artists demonstrate the vibrant interest in new media in this region and share their contributions to this ever-evolving art form.

Artists featured in this exhibition include: Mika Agari (Nashville, TN), Black & Jones (Clarksville, TN), Craig Coleman (Macon, GA), Patricia Earnhardt (Nashville, TN), David Hellams (Nashville, TN), Erin Colleen Johnson (Atlanta, GA), Eric Juth (Winston-Salem, NC), Blazo Kovacevic (Savannah, GA), Michael Siporin Levine (Athens, GA), Lisa McCarty (Durham, NC), Leigh Ann Parrish (Waynesville, NC), IlaSahai Prouty (Bakersville, NC), Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf (Atlanta, GA) and Joel Tauber (Winston-Salem, NC).

This exhibition was organized by the Asheville Art Museum. Members of the jury included Carolyn Grosch, Assistant Curator, Asheville Art Museum; George Fifield, Director, Boston Cyberarts Inc.; Candace Reilly, Adult Programs Manager, Asheville Art Museum; and Morgan Santander, Artist and Former Professor at Savannah College of Art and Design.