Being There

Lei Cox “ Being There”

May 04-June 02 2012
Opening: May 4, 7pm
Gurevich Fine Art Gallery
Winnipeg, MB

LEI COX

Follow Lei Cox on a journey to fiction and back again inBeing There. Video Pool Media Arts Centre in collaboration with Gurevich Fine Art are pleased to present a retrospective of Lei Cox`s work from 1986 to 2011.  Current work includes: Being There: a triptych video  performance  inspired by a life long obsession with flight, space travel and human desire to push the envelope. Catching Sight of Sputnik 2009/11, Race 2010/11, and Auto Draw 2010  will be exhibited together displaying a range of work that begins a 26-year quest to find a surrealistic fiction, or the unusual, in everyday life through the medium of photography and video.

ANDREW MILNE

“Mechanical Shadows” A series of mechanical representations inquire about the future and the history of reproduction. Sculpture, photography, drawing, painting all move within the images resisting definition as any one medium. Reconstructions of body and vision are formed by the mechanical hand of a photographic artist;
the gaze manifests as the shadow of shadows.

DOUGLAS SMITH

Defining identity is dubious, the identity of a period in time even more so. We do however, associate certain colours, fashions and values to specific eras in time; one example being the international exportation and influence of America’s particular tastes and values via Hollywood. I revisit the notion of identity of previous decades, essentially Canadian and North American identity, through a series of inventive portraitures, using various painted surface treatments and hand-cut paper elements.

LEI COX BIOGRAPHY

Lei Cox works with video installation, video art, performance-to-camera and photography and has shown his work worldwide since 1985. His work has often been described a surreal, humorous and science fictional. Cox began working with black and white photography, this was essentially shot straight and with no special effects where finding the unusual in everyday landscapes and portraits was the dominant theme. These early photographs were made with full-frame purity, dramatic light with high contrast and tonal exaggeration.

The work changed direction after considering experimentation with sandwich negatives in the enlarger, studio lighting work, filmmaking and video art and the vast possibilities of moving images and early digital video effects. Together with parallel interests in sound and music, video art and video installation became his main form of expression. Later utilizing digital broadcast quality production and post production equipment he began questioning the need for extensive compositing, the reliance of the computer and the over complication of some works which took up to two years to construct.

Major solo exhibitions have been shown in the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Laing Gallery, Newcastle and Gallery Rene Coelho, Amsterdam. Cox has also been exhibited in shows including Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tate Gallery Liverpool, Osnabruck European Media Art Festival, His Single screen work has been shown in over 70 international festivals and he has recently completed an interactive camera obscura public artwork, The Dark Room:  Mountain to Sea – Beyond Site which is situated on Cairngorm Mountain in Scotland.