TJ Norris and Scott Wayne Indiana

 

TJ Norris

TJ Norris is a multidisciplinary artist, curator (Tufts Aidekman Art Center, Miller Fine Art Center/Linfield College, SUNY Binghamton Art Museum, The Smithsonian) and writer (Leonardo/MIT Press, artNews, Signal to Noise, Paris Transatlantic). His critically acclaimed work has been called conceptual, ascetic and minimal and is a hybrid of photography, installation, video, sculpture and collaboration, shown and collected throughout North America and Europe. Norris has worked with a host of composers including Nobukazu Takemura, Scanner, Asmus Tietchens, Terre Thaemlitz, Paul Schutze, Christian Renou, Leif Elggren, Janek Schaefer and others and has compiled recordings for both Innova Recordings/American Composers Forum and Beta-lactam Ring Records.

 

For more information visit: www.tjnorris.net

 

Scott Wayne Indiana

Scott Wayne Indiana is currently living and working in New York City.Ê His thoughtful art projects attempt to engage the general public, inviting participants to re-think various ideas about life and reality.ÊWith a background in mathematics and philosophy, Indiana is largely a self-taught artist, though a passion for interactvity led to his current place of graduate study: ITP at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

 

For more information visit: www.39forks.com

 

About the art

Repurposed from their exhibition at the Bureau for Open Culture, TJ Norris' and Scott Wayne Indiana's shirt is printed two color with glow in the dark ink. Here's curator James Voorhies statement about the work:

 

M_US__ EUM has a soft white, radiant glow. It is the exact same material as other neon texts, seen in signage every where for everything, from booze and strip clubs to donut shops, diners, and dry cleaners. The basic white neon material is used to visually construct language in this work by TJ Norris and Scott Wayne Indiana. It is immediate: a viewerÕs response to M_US__ EUM. Amusement registers at the sight of the three letters ÒA,Ó ÒO,Ó and ÒLÓ burnt out, dark, then recognition of the juxtapositionÑMUSEUM / MAUSOLEUM. We get it. Instead of soliciting wares or services, M_US__ EUM invites the viewer to look at a past and a present in order to take stock of the identity of a museum space.

 

This play with the concepts of container and content in M_US__ EUM evokes a kind of postmortem. The question is, with what kind of museum space do viewers identify that mourning? It is yet another example of how we mine historical memory to decipher the thing before us. Norris and IndianaÕs direct use of language makes that process all the more immediate. Two polar extremes come to mind. On the one hand, there is the museum as a place of quiet dignity, with objects collected, preserved, and displayed; these inspire rich contemplation and production of knowledge about cultures across centuries of time and place. But that identity may conjure a space vacuous of energy that relegates objects to cold storage. On the other hand, the recent proliferation of new culture complexes has created a completely different type of museum space, one equipped with people-moving and crowdcontrolling devices: escalators, stanchions, commodities, and timed tickets. The new role of museum-c u m-c u lt u ra l-center may be considered as a passing loss of that space of quiet dignity.

 

In this instance and in accordance with the associations of a neon sign, the super-marketing of culture has relegated the traditional museum space to entombment.

 

-James Voorhies
Director of Exhibitions, Bureau for Open Culture
Columbus College of Art & Design