SCOTT PATRICK WIENER

Before I Forget

From: May 14, 2011 - June 18, 2011
Reception: Saturday, May 18, 6-8pm

Proof Gallery is very pleased to present Before I Forget, new works by Scott Patrick Wiener. Wiener is a Boston-based artist with a multi-faceted practice that is concerned with the mechanics of memory: its construction, reliability, function and meaning when expressed as lens-based images. Through various methodologies including reconstructing sets from descriptions of memories, re-processing and re-presenting photographs, Wiener approaches the unstable center of the concept.

Included in Before I Forget are video and photographic works that explore ways to fix memory and reprocess its narratives. "Northwest from Quarry Steps at Mauthausen" is an image from a series where the artist made photographs of beauty in nature in the opposite directions of Concentration Camp Memorial Sites. "The Pond/Moonlight (after Steichen)" is a video, which fragments Steichen's pictorialist original into two channels through sculptural and technological reconstruction. "Montezuma Castle – June 1987" is a composite derived from a photograph made by the artist's father of Montezuma's Castle in Arizona - a site which incorrectly names the ruins of the cliff dwellings of the Sinagua people. "Some Kind of Equilibrium" juxtaposes a swarm of flies around a man's head and the hypnotic insidious hovering of a single fly on dual channels of video. All of the works are experiences constructed with their seams very consciously exposed, prompting us to question our histories at the moment of their creation.

Scott Patrick Wiener (b. 1977 - Baltimore, MD) is a Boston-based artist who spent most of his early life traveling from one military base to another, never spending more than four years in one place at a time. The work he produces is a direct result of an attempt to hold onto time and place – to stabilize it. He proceeds accordingly by using lens-based media to reference past personal or socio-historic events reinforcing their antagonistic specificity as objects in the present. Wiener earned his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently, he completed a post-graduate DAAD Scholarship for Fine Arts in Leipzig, DE (2009-10) and a residency program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA (2010). His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. The project entitled "The Luxury of Distance" (2008-10) completed during his grant period in Germany will be exhibited at Anthony Greaney in early 2012. The artist and Proof Gallery would like to thank the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University for the generous loan of equipment for this exhibition.

- Artist's Website