Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
7:00 p.m., free admission Matt Mullican discusses the collisions of real and virtual space in his work with digital and interactive media in the past twenty years. "I went from being surrounded by things—dealing with how we name them and how we experience our environment through naming—to the opposite end of the spectrum: starting with nothing, then calling the objects into being."
For Triple Canopy's tenth issue,
And Yet It Moves, Matt Mullican collaborated with computer programmer Patrick Smith to create "
Planetarium," a navigable scale model of the solar system. Mullican first experimented with digital environments in 1991, when he made
Five into One, a virtual city constructed in accordance with his personal visual vocabulary and cosmological order. Exploring that city, Mullican was transfixed by his ability to leave the earth's surface and travel into nothingness. "I would fly upward," he says, "farther and farther into the sky, beyond the stratosphere, into pure, white, infinite space. I would go on forever, so far away from this city I had created that I couldn't find my way back. I became curious about where, exactly, I was when I was out there, in the middle of nowhere." This experience of unbounded space became a leitmotif in later works. At Artists Space Mullican will present and discuss his many explorations of virtual space—and the strange space between the virtual and the real—and examine their relationship to his iconographic sculptures, prints, and installations, as well as his performances under hypnosis.
Matt Mullican was born in 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and currently lives in Berlin. His work has been exhibited extensively in the US and internationally. Recently, his work was included in "The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009) and the 2008 Whitney Biennial; it has also been exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2005); and Museu Serralves, Porto (2001). Mullican's work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the STUK Kunstencentrum in Leuven, Belgium, which will be traveling to de Appel, Amsterdam, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Benefit edition for Triple Canopy: 
Matt Mullican From Me (in Space), 2010
Archival pigment print
Diptych, each panel 17 x 22 inches
Edition of 30, signed and numbered by the artist
Published by Christine Burgin and Triple Canopy
View detail images » $450.00
Purchase online or contact us for more information. All proceeds benefit Triple Canopy's artistic and literary programs.
Triple Canopy is an online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet's specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them. Triple Canopy is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization.
Triple Canopy gratefully acknowledges
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, The Buddy Taub Foundation,
Foundation for Contemporary Arts,
Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics (FEAST), The Polis-Schutz Family Foundation of the
Jewish Community Foundation,
New York Council for the Humanities,
New York State Council on the Arts, and
The Prospect Hill Foundation, as well as the many individuals and in-kind contributors who have generously given their support.
