George Legrady September 14, 2006

Pari Nadimi Gallery and York University present an exhibition and a lecture by George Legrady.

George Legrady

Algorithmic Visualizations
at Pari Nadimi Gallery
September 16 to October 21, 2006
Opening reception Saturday, September 16, 2-5 PM

Lecture
at: York University, Department of Visual Arts
in Accolate West Room 102
September 14, 2006, 12.00-1.30 PM

George Legrady, FlameSine Wave, ink on paper, 42" x 56", 2006

Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Los Angeles based artist George Legrady.

"Algorithmic Visualizations" features recent works by the media artist George Legrady. The works on display are related to his recent commissions for the Los Angeles MetroRail subway and the Rem Koolhaas designed Seattle Public Library, as well as to his ongoing exploration of the visual forms inherent in bodies of data and mathematical processes. Legrady began working with the algorithms in the mid-1980s discovering them in surveillance and satellite image processing literature. Of his initial investigations, he states: "it became quickly apparent that I could leave out the referent photographic image to be processed, and explore the aesthetic potential of the algorithmic processes in themselves." The code itself became the source for new aesthetic forms, "Visual expressions of the equations, shaped and massaged as Marshall MacLuhan would say". This ongoing project is exhibited here in the form of large scale projections and a series of digital prints.

"Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive" (GCVMA) premiered at the International Society of Electronic Arts (ISEA 06) in San Jose, consists of a dynamically growing collection of cellphone images forwarded by exhibition visitors and anyone else on the planet who participates by contributing an image to the archive. The gallery visualization showcases a sampling of the images and tags from the archive according to their popularity as influenced by participants through tagging the images.

In response to the work of George Legrady, the media theorist Lev Manovich says the following:

"The never-ending animations of George Legrady are elegant, sophisticated, and subtle - something we don't always expect from computer-generated works. As any good art work, they are engaged in multiple dialogs: with Vasarely and Op Art, Roman bath floors, contemporary sciences of complexity and chaos, and indigenous handmade baskets, And, as all other good works of art, they establish their own worlds not reducible to anything which came before.

For me, the pulsating and never repeating patterns of Legrady's animations act as a kind of portraits of the invisible electronic environment. In the 1940s Mondrian recorded new pulsating grids of a quintessential modern urban spaces - Manhattan. In the 1960s Warhol captured a different grid - the endlessly repeated advertising images. Today Legrady makes visible for us yet another grid which defines our times - the electronic network which treats both humans and machines as its nodes."

George Legrady is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980's to integrate computer processes into his artistic work, producing pioneering prizewinning projects in the early 1990's such as the "Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War" (1993), "Slippery Traces" (1995), "Sensing Speaking Space" (2002), and more recently the internationally traveling "Pockets Full of Memories" (2001-2006). His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation into a discipline in the early 1990's has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing as a means of creating new forms of aesthetic representations and socio-cultural narrative experiences. His digital interactive installations have been exhibited internationally most recently at ISEA 06, San Jose (2006); 3rd Beijing New Media Festival (2006); Frankfurt Museum of Communication (2006); Telic Gallery, Los Angeles (2006), BlackBox 06 at ARCO, Madrid (2006), the Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester (2005), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2004), Ars Electronica (2003), DEAF03, Rotterdam (2003), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002), Centre Georges Pompidou (2001), the National Gallery of Canada (1997) and others. He has received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for the Arts, Science and Technology, the Canada Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pari Nadimi Gallery
254 Niagara Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6J 2L8

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-5 pm
Tel: 416.591.6464 Fax: 416.591.9251
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