PAST EXHIBITIONS:

MICHAEL AUDER

Thursday, May 11, 6-8 PM

Newman Popiashvili Gallery is pleased to present Michel Auder’s newest video work - “The World Out of My Hands.” The piece incorporates scenes from tapes the artist recorded over the past decade. The thirty-minute video is culled from hundreds of hours of raw footage. This piece is constructed from tightly cropped narratives that speak of the narrative experience in general.

Unlike most documentary video work, Auder’s latest piece does not give the viewer one of his, e.g. the artist’s – experiences; rather he gives the viewer the sense that the viewer is doing the looking and the experiencing him or herself. The passively held camera records not dispassionately, but without judgment. The subjects of Auder’s work give us a picture of humanity that is so close to the truth that it is disarming.

When Auder is catching the image of scenes devoid of humans, the work does not grow more impersonal rather, it becomes more private. The train we are riding on (and it is us who is now ridding on it, not Auder) zips by at speeds that seem unstably fast yet it is just exhilarating – it does not threaten our desire just to look and experience. Auder’s voice is not present.

And that lack of presence becomes his greatest talent. As the artist, he is the transparent medium though which we pass seamlessly into a world that he has gently given to us. We see the church scene in St. Petersburg and we see the people in the Buddhist temple in Taiwan. They are talking to one another completely without the discomfort that is generally seen in documentary scenes, where those being videoed display the self-editing behavior of the self-conscious and inhibited human.

Auder mixes sound in ways that are unusual. Not being satisfied that one sound accompanies one corresponding image, Auder lets the sound track travel and reappear again synced to a different image. It is as though the memory of the earlier image is now there with the experience of a new image.

In “The World Out of My Hands” we can hear him playing (very nicely) the piano while we look at an outdoor party scene in Bolivia; next the camera moves – without contradiction – to birds in Switzerland, and then to scenes taken from a hand-held camera in a small plane that is flying near the former World Trade Center towers. Again, we see the birds. Nature is interspersed with people who actually appear to be quite a part of nature. The psychological states of all of the people are infused with the grounding provided by their rituals or by their subtle yet firm connections with one another. Life is bound by these ties and these moments of transition, which Auder is content to quietly record them and show them to us with the clarity of our own memories.

Michel Auder has shown extensively and most recently had a retrospective at the 11th Biennial for the Moving Image in Geneva and solo exhibitions at Sextant et Plus in Marseille, Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, and The Renaissance Society in Chicago. He will have an upcoming project with Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris.