Doug Aitken
Can You Say... 2007?
Date 4/16/07
Affiliation Artist, Los Angeles
Abstract
¨Let´s make it, break it, and make it new again¨.
Bio
Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the frontier of 21st century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, Aitken’s eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts.
Aitken’s work effortlessly slips into our media-saturated cultural unconscious allowing the viewer to experience cinema in a unique way by deconstructing a connection between sound, moving images and the rhythms of our surroundings. Treating the world as his studio, he edits together frenetic and unique models of contemporary experience.
Aitken employs a number of post studio artistic mediums – photography, sculpture, architecture, sound installation, and multi channel video installation. In each of his artworks, Aitken chooses the medium or combination that amplifies and visually articulates the subject’s qualities. The scale of the work can vary from a simple photograph to a complex moving sculpture of infinitely reflective automated mirrors. Quasi-narrative films create intricate mazes of open-ended stories told across reinterpreted physical architecture. To this end, his 2007 'sleepwalkers' installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York re-imagines the museum's outdoor walls and façade as a screen onto which a film is projected. Recently, Aitken also produced “Broken Screen”, a book of interviews with 26 artists pushing the limits of linear narrative. The project inspired two “happening” events in New York and Los Angeles.
Aitken lives and works in Los Angeles. His non-stop and extensive explorations inform his work with a modern nomadic existence, where travel and movements are folded into our daily experience. Aitken has had numerous screenings, solo and group exhibitions around the world including the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he won the International Prize for his acclaimed installation “electric earth.” He’s exhibited work in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Pompidou Center in Paris.
-- As of 4/16/07