China Town: A Video by Lucy Raven
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - Artist Lucy Raven, whose video installation Leap (2008)
is included in MASS MoCA's current exhibition Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China, will premiere her new experimental video China Town at MASS MoCA on Saturday, January 31, at 2 PM in MASS MoCA's Club B-10. Raven has traced the process of copper ore production from an open pit mine in Nevada, through Utah and the port of Vancouver in Washington state, across the Pacific to the port of Nanjing in China, and finally to a smelter in Tongling. The program, which looks at the connections between the U.S. and China, will open with a special screening of Shanghai-based filmmaker Mathieu Borysevicz's short Taian Lu (2008), which takes the birth of his son as a metaphor for globalization. Curator Susan Cross will introduce the program. Artist Lucy Raven will introduce her work and take questions following the screenings. The event is free to members and $5 for not-yet-members.
China Town (2008) follows in detail the production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire, as well as the generation of waste that grows in both the U.S. and China as a byproduct. Raven tracks the production line from Ruth, Nevada, to China's massive Three Gorges Dam which, like a giant battery, generates, then stores, and distributes power to the country's large cities along wires made in part from Nevada rock. Many of the Nevada mine's early laborers in the late 1880s were exploited Chinese immigrants who were also involved in construction of the transcontinental railroad that connected both ends of the country just north of the pit, igniting mining production throughout Utah and Nevada.
The area where the workers lived on the mining site was called Chinatown. Today, the historic town of Ruth, which sits at the base of the mine and whose population largely works there, is another sort of China town: breaking down their mountains to export overseas. Demand for copper in China and other developing countries has raised the commodity price high enough to warrant the tremendous energy costs required to transport and refine the copper ore. Raven focuses on the American landscape as raw mineral wealth for developing nations.
Employing an innovative editing technique, Raven created China Town entirely with animated sequences of still photographs and ambient sounds recorded on location. Tens of thousands of individual images with varying frame rates are combined to create an atmospheric, at times disjointed, narrative that structurally echoes the different processes, human efforts, and geographic locations that combine in copper mining specifically and commodity production in general.
Brooklyn-based artist Lucy Raven is a multimedia artist, an editor of BOMB magazine, and co-founder and co-editor of the audiomagazine The Relay Project. Her recent stop-motion animations, including When the Ceiling has Become Visible, explore the landscape and ethos of the Dustbowl Era and take inspiration from photographer Walker Evans, among other sources. In addition to her work on display at MASS MoCA, Raven has exhibited at the Cleveland Institute of Art; Apex Art, New York; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York, Boise Museum of Art, Idaho; Performa, New York; and Lehman Maupin Gallery, New York. She has been the recipient of several distinguished residency awards by The Jon Mitchell Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Smyrna, Florida; The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Center for Land Use and Interpretation, Wendover, Utah.
Mathieu Borysevicz's short film Taian Lu mixes documentary, fiction, and fantasy in a story that unfolds as a strange day-in-the-life odyssey of a young couple who are about to have a Euro-Asian child. Urban China comes alive in this melding of allegory, fact, and poetry that centers around the residents of Taian Lu, No. 6, In the artist's words, the film "is a frenetic impressionistic ode to China as a global concept: a nation and society enmeshed in an erratic attempt to do too much too fast".
Mathieu Borysevicz is an artist, writer, curator, and filmmaker based in Shanghai and New York. His photography and film works have been shown internationally at venues such as The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; The Tribeca Film Festival; ICA, London; Jeu de Paume, Paris; The Bauhaus, Dessau; Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; and the Bronx Museum of Art. Since 1994 Borysevicz has written about Chinese contemporary culture, focusing on the intersections of social transformation and artistic production. He is currently ArtForum's correspondent in Shanghai, as well as founding editor of artforum.com.cn in Shanghai.
Tickets for the films and discussion are free for members and $5 for not-yet-members. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA Box Office located off Marshall Street in North Adams, open from 11 A.M. until 5 P.M., closed Tuesdays. Tickets can also be acquired by phone by calling 413-662-2111 during Box Office hours or purchased on line at www.massmoca.org.
