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Gitte
Villesen
The Building - The Bikeshop - Andy's Furniture
March 9 to April 14 2001
Opening Friday March 9 from 18-20
It is a great pleasure to present an exhibition with a new video
project by Gitte Villesen.
The Building
The work consists of a video installation and four photo- and text
collages. The text from the collages is on display on this homepage
as well and includes a list of most of the activities that goes
on in The Building, plus interviews with some of the people who
use The Building on a daily basis including the artist Dan Peterman
who owns the The Building.
The
building used to be owned by Ken Dunn and was at that time part
of his recycling center called The Resource Center. Dan worked for
him while he studied art and at some years later Dan bought the
building which he now runs as a community where flexibility and
non-center are two key-words.
The Building contains a number of different centers of activity,
one among them is a bikeshop, which besides repairing used bicycles
also functions as a place where local kids can hang out, repair
their own bikes and learn skills. Further more there is the editorial
office of the magazine The Baffler, Dan's studio, a residency for
visiting artists and the land around the buildings has been turned
into community gardens for the local residents etc. (Read more about
the different activities in the texts from the collages.)
The recordings where made during my residency at the guest studio
of The Building in April 2000. The video installation will be presented
in such a way that while for example watching the bikeshop there
will at intervals be mute sequences showing other parts of the house,
so that you will be reminded about the existency of parallel activities
and stories.
In this piece the focus is on the bikeshop and on Andy who is running
the bikeshop. Later on other pieces will follow with another starting
point in the story of The Building and the stories and activities
that are just touched upon in this first piece.
Besides a remarkable interest in recycling, local responsibility
and organic food it is characteristic for the Building that you
step into a world, where initative to change the concrete social
context is combined with an interest and practice within art. My
project is in continuation of earlier works like 'Søren Wellings
Small Town Museum' and 'Ingeborg the Busker Queen' where I have
focused on people who have developed their own set of rules/ principles
and ideals for how they want to live their life - and who have made
an effort to realise it in as far as their current situation allows
them to.
There is a long way from the busker queen Ingeborg, who lives alone
with her rats, parrots and cats in a village in Jutland to the Building
on the south side of Chicago, but I hope that the variaty in the
gallery of characters and geographic locality underlines the common
focus on people who despite culture, education, social repression,
economy etc. try to form their life in accordance with their own
ideals.
Another subject in some previous works has been parallels between
social connections in and outside the art world. E.g. 'Kathrine
makes them and Bent collects them' which is about a mutual relationship
between a producer and an enthusiastic collector of laces, which
to some extend can be compared to the relationship between the artist
and the art collector.
As Dan Peterman has an extensive artistic practice both in and outside
The Building these connections between different social worlds will
also be part of this work.
The benches in the show is borrowed from Dan Peterman, they are
made of recycled plastic and is part of his art practice.
I would like to thank Dan Peterman, Andy, and everybody else at
The Building.
Also I would like to thank Kulturministeriets Udviklingsfond for
support.
Gitte Villesen, Copenhagen, March 4, 2001
We welcome you in the gallery
Nicolai Wallner
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