Bartow + Metzgar

Spatio Geographica, installation view

Spatio Geographica: an experimental archive of human and nonhuman agents in North America, an exhibit in the Tyler Galleries (South) at SUNY Oswego, NY.  The urban samples represented in this exhibit were collected from Spring 2007 to Summer 2009.  Collections were pulled from Troy, NY; Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC; Miami, FL; Commerce, TX; and Oswego, NY.  This exhibition is an experimental production of an urban research archive of the human and nonhuman.  The exhibit is color-coded to the USGS Divisions of Geologic Time.  Each collection’s geographic origin is associated with its respective geologic time period.  Three geologic periods are represented by the five urban collections : Pleistocene, Paleogene, and Ordovician.  The height of each collection’s staging corresponds proportionately to the elevation of each collection’s geographic origin.  The exhibit layout corresponds to the Divisions of Geologic Time (for the three geologic time periods mentioned above) as mapped out across the eastern portion of the United States and Southeastern Canada.  See exhibition map below.

Spatio Geographica, view of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC collection.

Spatio Geographica, view of Rice Creek Field Station (Oswego) collection.

Spatio Geographica, view of Commerce, TX collection.

Spatio Geographica, view of Oswego collection.

Spatio Geographica, view of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC collection.

Spatio Geographica, view of Troy, NY collection and rock core from Oswego, NY collection (middle Ordovician period).

Spatio Geographica, exhibition map

Subanageographica: transvirtual perspectives in a semi-tropical environment, Installation view

Locust Projects, Miami, Florida

For Subanageographica, Bartow+Metzgar mapped out a section of the city (bound by highways and water) surrounding LP through the use of virtual mapping platforms.  These were used to investigate Miami from afar i.e., New York, Texas.  From this investigation, a system of directives was produced to establish routes for urban walks while in Miami.  The walks were conducted with the use of a videometer, a wheeled walking apparatus for recording the surficial landscape as qualities of time at various intensities.  What is recorded says less about what Miami is and more about what a landscape becomes when not seeking out productions of identity or representation.  As Iain Kerr alludes to in his writing for the brochure of this exhibit, the machine eye (videometer) is tuned to a time-vision beyond our body to a future body becoming.  The videos produced from this apparatus meets a quality of time that is neither a metric nor a representation, rather it registers as speeds and intensities.

Subanageographica: transvirtual perspectives in an semi-tropical environment, Installation view

Subanageographica: transvirtual perspectives in an semi-tropical environment, Installation view

Subanageographica, Google street view converted to strata drawing, used to determine monitor staging

Subanageographica, Strata drawing composite, used to determine monitor staging

Subanageographica, Videometer

Subanageographica, Video walk site (Miami)

Subanageographica, Video vector walk key

Subanageographica, Gallery key

Utopic Geographica, Installation view

Action Art Actuel, Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, Canada  

Bartow+Metzgar’s  installation Utopic Geographica, at Action Art Actuel, functioned as an experimental analysis of the urban environment of Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu through the multi-perspective lens of cartography, topography, geology, and microbiology at varying scales and intensities.  B+M’s consideration of utopia is framed as a question about who/what speaks, and what forms of engagement are needed to address the collective of the human and nonhuman?  

More images of this project can be found at Action Art Actuel.   

Utopic Geographica, Installation view

Utopic Geographica, Soil cores, particulate slides, and slurry slides

Utopic Geographica, Bacterial culture from Richelieu River, urban sample

Utopic Geographica, Bacterial culture from soil core, urban sample

Utopic Geographica, Gallery map key

Evergreen House and Museum, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Colloquiseum is a hybrid term created by B+M.  It was derived from the function of the museum as collection/archive, and the term colloquial, which we came to think of as a discussion/conversation with the “everyday.”  It is with these two words, that the act of dialogue is fused with the space of an archive.  The two combined produce a space of event, a haptic space, where the tactile world meets the conversational world.  During its exhibition period (8 months), the installation operated in several capacities: as a research space, an observation space, and an archive space.

Read Metamorphoglomulations, a catalogue essay for Colloquiseum by Iain Kerr.

Colloquiseum, Installation view

Colloquiseum, Upper deck view

Colloquiseum, Tree drawing (upper deck)

Detail, Tree drawing

Detail, Tree drawing

Colloquiseum, Microbial drawing, from site collections (organic and inorganic)

 More nonhuman drawings here.

Colloquiseum, Drawing with graticule, graticule station (upper deck)

Corrupture, Installation view

Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, NY

Corrupture was installed using a simple set of directives that utilized the gallery’s spatial dimensions and partition capacity.  Installation components were placed, respectively, into placement zones utilizing a category system developed specifically for this exhibition.  The use of a system stems from an interest that B+M have in mediators and their capacity to problematize the world.  For this installation the gallery was considered an active agent that could determine the layout of B+M’s assemblage.  Our methodology treats the gallery as a fully active space that is inherently complex and heterogeneous (multiple and varied).

Corrupture, Installation view

Corrupture, Installation view

Corrupture, Installation key

Lenticular Humours, Installation view

Lentiscopic Humours, Installation view

Texas A&M University at Commerce, Commerce, TX

Lenticular Humours was comprised of research from the urban environment of Commerce, TX.  What is the Urban given the radical shifts in population density i.e., movements involving the human and nonhuman from one rural or urban area to another urban area(s) that are happening throughout the world?  B+M are interested in this radical shift in population distribution that it is changing the complexity of the urban at all scales and forms of life.  The gallery became a site for experimentation (a three-dimensional modulation of urban information) where we could devote time to research and analysis of the urban collections pulled from Commerce.

Lenticular Humours, Installation view

Lenticular Humours, Detail of urban collections

Lentiscopic Humours, Bacterial cultures from urban collections

Interlubricous, Installation view

Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (UICA), Grand Rapids, MI

Interlubricous was tangentially linked to a six-month long (5/05-11/05) project called The Lost Meeting, a collaboration between J. Morgan Puett and the Art and Architecture collective spurse, of which Bartow + Metzgar are members,  located in Jenkintown, PA in a historic Quaker Meeting House. The Lost Meeting was conducted as a provisional design studio that investigated the “everyday” through mediators, primarily architectural and pattern drafting systems.  Bartow + Metzgar  selected several pattern files from the project to use as mediators for the design of our installation.  The selected patterns determined the location of Installation components within the exhibition space thereby complicating the relationship of objects with each other and the viewer.  The space of the installation emerged as a complex entaglement of voids, density, and distortion.

See more about The Lost Meeting here: http://www.jmorganpuett.com/tlm/index.html

Interlubricous, Installation view

Interlubricous, Installation view

Interlubricous, Installation view

Interlubricous, Installation key