[ISEA2019] Artist Statement: Annette Weintraub — Taking the Long View: Expanding the Spatial Envelope from Picture Plane to Panorama in Contested Space

Artist Statement

Keywords: Perception, Urban Media, Altered Reality, Landscape, Internet Art, Architecture, Psychogeography, Material Culture, Narrative, Panorama.

Contested Spaces: The Myrtle Walks presents eight online images that use a slow-moving scroll through an extended horizontal format to recreate a series of meditative walks through the mixed industrial/residential neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn (NY, USA). This work-in-progress web project explores the disorder and fragmentation of the marginal spaces in which everyday life occurs — what Henri Lefebvre called residual space — represented by a jumble of vernacular architecture, hand lettered signage, discarded consumer items and industrial castoffs. This presentation first touches on the pictorial conventions historically employed in landscape painting, from the rectangular frame of the Renaissance picture plane to the long horizontal of Asian manuscript handscrolls and discusses how the panorama, cyclorama and moving panorama are formats that parallel the experience of walking and thus create an experience that immerses the viewer in a narrative space.

  • Annette Weintraub’s work is an investigation of architecture as visual language and the symbolism of space. Her projects integrate narrative elements into diverse conceptual representations of space, considering the boundary between personal and public space and the social meanings of landscape. Her examination of marginal urban spaces explores the visually rich interstices where historical rupture, economic difference, cultural markers and vernacular language coalesce in an inadvertent space. She uses the practice of walking meditation to integrate memory and spontaneous discovery, most recently in a series of online images in which the panoramic format becomes a container for a series of visual and aural narratives that celebrate urban space and the peculiarities of everyday life. Her projects have been shown at venues including: FILE Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Everhart Museum in Scranton, PA; Heara 8 in Jerusalem; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; 5th Salon de Arte in Cuba; Video Biennal Israel; 5th Biennial of Media and Architecture in Graz Austria; The Whitney Biennial; International Center for Photography/ICP; Chiang Mai New Media Art Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Viper in Switzerland; at SIGGRAPH and ISEA and numerous other venues. Commissions include The Rushlikon Centre for Global Dialogue, CEPA and Turbulence. She is Professor of Art and Founding Director of the BFA in Electronic Design & Multimedia at The City College of New York, CUNY.

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