Brown Foundation Gallery
November 24, 2018 - January 13, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, November 24, 2018
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
Lina Dib
Threshold
Threshold is an interactive video installation by Houston-based artist Lina Dib that incorporates video of waves breaking on the Galveston shore just before sunset. The shore’s infinite poetic qualities, constant ebb and flow, and collision of bodies (land and sea) features largely in Dib’s work. Threshold is a kind of homage to Thierry Kuntzel’s The Waves and to Andy Warhol’s Sunset. It is a tribute and meditation on the specificities of place and our relationship to natural systems. Post Hurricane Harvey, this piece is part of a larger series of toxic and luring landscapes. Activating 3D space, the video slows down, the audio slows to a deep rumble, and the color desaturates as viewers get closer to the screen. When the video is at a near standstill, viewers can “liquify” the image with their bodies. In a sense, the piece gestures to our clumsy attempts to push back nature and to presume we can control things so large they border on the unfathomable.
Programming: Taylor Knapps
Lina Dib was born in Montreal, Canada and currently lives and works in Houston, TX. Dib is a multidisciplinary artist and anthropologist. Her installations and compositions range from the experimental to the ethnographic and investigate socio-technical and ecological change. Dib is an affiliate artist at the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University in Montreal and TX/RX Labs in Houston, and a research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Rice University where she also teaches. She is co-founder of Fossilized Houston and the Solar Studios. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, AMIDA’s European training program, the Moody Center for the Arts, and the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance among others. Recent publications include Audible Observatories: Notes on Performances (Bloomsbury); Sonic Breakdown, Extinction and Memory (continent.), The Forgetting Dis-ease: Making Time Matter (differences), and Of Promises and Prototypes: The Archeology of the Future (LIMN). Her work has been presented at venues including, Hierarchy Gallery Washington, DC; Lawndale Art Center, Houston; Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; MOP Projects, Sydney; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Day For Night, Houston; the Whitney Biennial 2017; and at Johnson Space Center NASA.
www.linadib.com
