Critical Writing Index

The New Sleep: Stasis and the Image-Bound Environment

by Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo

Art Journal, Fall 1985, v. 45, no. 3, pp. 244-248

This journal highlights five artists and their significant works - Joseph Nechvatal, Lily Lack, Gretchen Bender, Sara Hornbacher, Paul Nichols.

Joseph Nechvatal: Grace Under Pressure

Nechvatal's work quietly proposes that the act of Scrutiny must be equal in its power to the spectacle of commercialized Sleep. These acts of scrtiny and their necessity are effectively implied by the use of a gray, Renaissance or tatoo-liked field or environment of super-statically charged images.

Lily Lack: Detergent

The credibility of the object is undercut by the institutional disarray of the product in Sheila, and the existential disarray of production in This is My Life.

Gretchen Bender: Total Effect - Neutralization and the Psychedelic Concept

Bender's psychedelic hyper-appropriated image-bound environment - comprising visual, computer-generated, and video work - asserts a disparate instrumentality in the aesthetics of neutralized signs.

Sara Hornbacher: Torque Habit

Hornbacher's work leads people to experience the rational mediation of images optically as a kind of static disfiguration of light. Also, her work summarizes the visual tautology involved in perception.

Paul Nichols: Transcendental Stasis

The cultural cliches and appropriated ad elements in Nichols's work set up a kind of cartoonish synthesis that enables us to look at the apparently arbitrary nature of the transcendental.

ITEM 1985.114 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Grace Under Pressure – Joseph Nechvatal

When Things Get Tough on Easy Street – Joseph Nechvatal

Sheila – Lily Lack

This is My Life – Lily Lack

Wild Dead II – Gretchen Bender

Dumping Core – Gretchen Bender

Mid-Effect Hold – Gretchen Bender

Untitled – Gretchen Bender

Wild Dead III – Gretchen Bender

An American Sequence – Sara Hornbacher

Hysteria – Paul Nichols

Two People – Paul Nichols