Michael Rees

Model Behavior

September 19th, 2009 to November 7th, 2009

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 19th, 6:00 to 9:00 PM

Artist’s Talk: Saturday, September 19th, 2:00 PM

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Model Behavior. Model Behavior is an exhibition of Michael’s new work and includes sculpture, drawings, animation, photographs, and interactive media. The ideas hinge on the word model. The first sense of this word is an ideal, an aspiration or an inspiration. At the same time to model something is to map it, make a simulation of it or to emulate it. To model something is to give it form, to reify it. Models are the first steps in the evolution of a product; they carry the original intent of a thing and lay out the constituent parts.

Adding the word behavior emphasizes the ideal quality of the endeavor and creates an equivalency that is reiterated in the sculptures. The equivalency refers to the distance between a model (a concept) and a behavior (an action). For Rees this distance is a generative space where works begin to bifurcate formally and semantically. Through iteration and reiteration, these experiences take form upon the crystalline structure of the sculptures’ material. These options are contained within that material. The options speak to different impulses and layers of a piece, creating a valence of meanings. There is humor and conflict in this show: some of the works would never be considered an ideal of anything. They are play oriented puzzles, riddles of stability and instability. Through the process of combining and recombining themes and objects there is at once stasis and fluidity. The act of making these works is like breathing or walking. They are basic, held close to automatic processes and to liminal space.

To mine this mental to physical space and to extract from it potential and even ethical implications of action is to participate in mimetic culture. Making is a process that can be transferred through objects to others though communication. It can open up possibilities, potentials, and meanings. It can play in the unwinding of human experience. For Rees, this takes place through the consonance and dissonance of the works in Model Behavior.

Rees investigates aspects of a language, body, and humor dynamic in works that are physical, virtual, figurative and abstract. He has exhibited his work throughout Europe and the United States, both in private and public venues. The institutions Michael Rees is collected by include the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Edelman Foundation in Luzern, Switzerland. He has won a Creative Capital Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a New Jersey Council on the Arts Grant. He is a Media Arts Fellow of the Tribeca Film Institute funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. In June 2009, He will open large scale work at the Zentrum fur Medien Kunst in Karlsruhe curated by Peter Weibel and will do a project space at the Chelsea Art Museum called Social Object: sculpture and Software.

Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance and conceptual future media installations. The gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artists to make positive change.