michael rees
Robert Gero
Robert Gero’s work – both built and written - is grounded in the practical and theoretical intersection of studio art practice, theory and philosophy. He hold’s an M.F.A. in sculpture and an M.A. in philosophy/aesthetics from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of art/ art theory from the New School for Social Research in New York.
He has exhibited nationally and internationally, selected exhibitions include the 45th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, Artist Space, New York, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, Tom Solomon’s Gallery, Los Angeles,Frederieke Taylor Gallery, NY, Makor Gallery, New York, UICA, Grand Rapids, MI, Lab Gallery, New York, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica CA. He has recently been awarded an Art Matters grant, NY (2011) for his “Time of the Roma" a multi-teried project that includes video installation, a symposium, with an accompanying catalogue.
Michael Rees' work traverses a wide range of activities and efforts. He has shown at the Whitney Museum in the 1995 Biennial and again in 2001 in the exhibition BitStreams. His work has been exhibited in New York galleries and in private and public collections. Rees works in a broad continuum of sculptural practice. His work utilizes performance, installation, sculptural objects, computer programs, and interactivity.
In 2011 Rees work was included in Fundamentally Human: Visual Art and Neuroscience at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. In 2010 Rees exhibited Social Object: sculpture and software at the Chelsea Art Museum. In 2009 Rees opened Putto 4 over 4 sculpture and animation at the Zentrum fur Medien Kunst (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Peter Weibel spoke at length about the sculpture at the opening ceremony. He also opened Model Behavior a one person show of sculpture and photographs at the Deborah Colton Gallery in Houston, Texas. In 2008 Rees won a Rockefeller Renew Media Grant for the project Social Object: sculpture and software at the Chelsea Art Museum. He exhibited Converge: Ghraib Bag at The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, Ghent, New York.
In 2007 Rees performed Live Life at a day of performance in Matthew Barney’s studio. Barney curated a day of performance which included a Barney piece and German Artist Jonathon Meese. In 2007 he also won a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual State Fellowship Award. In May of 2005. Rees' work was in Germany at the MARTa Museum in Herford. It was curated by Jan Hoet. His work opened during the opening of the new museum designed by Frank Gehry.
Rees has pioneered the use of digital media in sculpture. In the Ajna Series, he experimented widely in the mid 1990's with 3D modeling and 3D printing. Many of these works have been exhibited at the Kemper Museum, The Whitney Museum, the Pera Museum, and in New York Galleries. They are in private and public collections. In the late 1990's he built the Sculptural User Interface with various collaboarators including Chris Burnett and Donald Guarnierri. Collaborative exhbtions with the SUI at its core were exhbited at the Chelsea Art Museum and at the Visual Arts Galleries of the School of Visual Art.
Rees’ work sits at the intersection between ideas in biology, linguistics, and technology to weave a rich sculptural melange. It often addresses figuration through a variety of media. The work maintains three branches of the same limb in his work .The body refers to the Monster series and its attendant animations. These are concerned with the manipulated body and with multiple consciousness folded into an animate constructed body. The mind refers to the Sculptural User Interface with its parallel attendance to tendencies in conceptual art and computer science (the readymade, an extension of Beuys notion of social sculpture and open source software as a ready made made ready.) And finally some notion of the fantastic: Rees' Ajna Series is the conflation of western analytic science and eastern metaphysics with a special blend of surrealism from Batailles Visions of Excess.
Rees is Associate Professor of Sculpture and Digital Media at William Paterson University.
