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About the artists:

Robert Smithson was born in 1938 in Passaic, New Jersey. Smithson is internationally recognized as one of the groundbreaking artist in earthworks. Spiral Jetty (1970), a monumental earthwork located in the Great Salt Lake, Utah is one his most important and well-known works. Smithson produced sculptures, earthworks, drawings, paintings and writings, which have had a profound impact on sculpture and art theory. His work is featured in major museum collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo. Robert Smithson died in 1973.

Terry Fox was born in 1943. He studied at the Cornish School of Allied Arts in Seattle and the Accademia di Belli Arti in Rome. In the 1960’s he lived in San Francisco where he was a central figure in the West Coast art movements. Terry Fox worked with performance art, video, sound works and sculptures. His works often had a political content and he explored the ritual and symbolic meanings in everyday objects. Children’s Tapes from 1974 is a classic video work where Fox investigates these objects in the everyday life. Terry Fox lived and worked in Europe the last years of his life and died in Cologne, Germany 2008.

Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York in 1943. He studied French literature at the Sorbonne and Architecture at Cornell University. In Paris Gordon Matta-Clark was influenced by the Situationist movement and as other artist like Robert Smithson, he came to reject the commodification of art. Matta-Clark worked with photography, film, video, performance, drawing, large-scale sculpture and architecture. In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark founded Food Restaurant in New York, together with Caroline Godden. It became a gathering place for art, music and performances. Matta-Clark is mostly known for his work that can be described as deconstructive architecture or ‘anarchitecture’, where buildings would be modified in ways of carving and sawing. Gordon Matta-Clark died at a young age in 1978.

Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1938. She studied at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Nancy Holt is a pioneer in earthworks, public art and environmental sculptures. She also works in media such as installation, film, video, and photography. She collaborated with Robert Smithson in several film and video works, for example Swamp. Nancy Holt has produced site-specific environmental works in numerous places around the world and one of her best-known work is Sun Tunnels in Utah (1976). Nancy Holt lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico.

Leah Singer (born 1962) is best known for her live film projection work. She graduated from New York University’s, “Intensive Filmmaking Program” in 1988 and from Ryerson University, Toronto, in 1984, majoring in journalism with a focus on film and photography. In her work Leah Singer experiments with 16mm motion picture film imbedded in a 35mm still camera and she calls upon film as an active performance. She utilizes a catalogue of films in an improvisatory way during live performances through the use of analytical film projectors. This way a story is simultaneously formed and fragmented, enabling viewers to encounter variations in corporeal textures and associations, and each performance takes on a new shape. Leah Singer produced a significant body of sculptural work, drawings, prints, artist’s books, and ephemera. Copy, her self-published graphic newspapers produced since 1997and are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Singer also contributed to the showOld News, a project at CNEAI in Paris Her work has been shown, among others, at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, at Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, at Rocket Gallery, Tokyo, at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, at the Fundacao Serralves, Porto, at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and at the Kitchen, New York. Leah Singer is the partner and frequent collaborator of musician and poet Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Their central live film and music performance, DRIFT, has been shown in different venues around the world and was recreated for DVD and released with an accompanying book in 2005. In 2008 they did a collaborative exhibition of drawings, prints, sculpture, sound and video Space Within These Lines Not Dedicated, co-curated with Jan Van Woensel at Hudson Valley Community College, Troy, New York.

Lee Ranaldo (born 1956) is a musician, visual artist and writer. He graduated in 1978 from Harpur College/State University of New York at Binghamton with concentrations in painting, printmaking, and cinema. Lee Ranaldo is a co-founder and original member of the group Sonic Youth, formed in 1981 in New York City. Sonic Youth have continued to record new music and tour the world on a regular basis. Ranaldo is presently touring with “Sonic Youth etc: Sensational Fix”, a show examining cultural works of the past three decades through the lens of Sonic Youth’s activities. Recent exhibitions of Lee Ranaldo includes the Space Within These Lines Not Dedicatedand Drift, both in collaboration with Leah Singer; Possibilities of Action: The Life of the Score, a show on the visual possibilities of modern scores, musical and otherwise; and Old News, a group show centred on artists working with newspapers. Lee Ranaldo is also a member of Text of Light, a group formed in 2001 that performs improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of the American Cinema avant-garde of the 1950s-60s. Ranaldo has a vast body of solo and group sound and music works, among others the multi-channel sound installationMaelstrom from Drift, 2006. He has also extensively collaborated on film music projects for Todd Haynes, Olivier Assayas, Dania Saragovia, and Richard Linklater. His own films and videos include Notebook, King’s Ogg, Book of Dreams: A Visit to Kerouac’s Lowell, a series of ‘noise movies’, and many others. His published books include Hello From The American Desert (poems derived from Internet spam), Sorry Matt, Road Movies, Lengths & Breaths and Moroccan Journal: Jajouka Excerpt. Numerous catalogues and publications document his work both as a performer, musician and artist. Ranaldo’s visual art & sound works have been shown most recently at ZKM, Karlsruhe; MACBA, Barcelona; and ISCP, Brooklyn. Maelstrom from Drift, a new solo CD, was released in May 2008.