Regina Gouger Miller Gallery | Carnegie Mellon University

Pushing Sisyphus is a multimedia installation by Lauren Frances Adams concerned with issues of labor and its expression in slogans, propaganda, and the decorative arts.  The installation features domestic settings cast as histrionic psychic space.  The environment is loosely based on a character created by the artist who is obsessed with Soviet communist propaganda and American capitalist propaganda.  In effect, the work attempts to ‘push back’ at Sisyphus, the mortal who was punished by the gods to roll a boulder up a mountain, only to have it always roll back again, for eternity.

www.lfadams.com

My work uses narrative as a way to filter through my own memories of growing up in rural America, where perhaps ideas of the cultural norm were pulled from various forms of media due to physical and social isolation.  In particular, I find myself very interested in questioning certain staples of culture and their effect on the psyche.  Romance, sexual identity, femininity, desire, lust, violence, fear and power all play a part in the reality I am questioning and the fictions I concoct.

jandescartes@hotmail.com

David W. Halsell will be exhibiting two quasi-scientific devices that detect and amplify extra-sensory stimuli in the gallery environment. One is a device that “plays” the texture of the gallery wall like a record player, the other a real-time video installation of a wave machine that is manipulated by seismic vibration and sounds above and below human hearing.

www.dwhalsell.com

As an artist and technologist concerned with the importance of play, Ian Ingram’s work takes the form of toy-like robotic sculptures and game-oriented mechatronic installations.  A toy can serve as a portal to profound experience and Ian attempts to create such toys, often with associated narrative elements that lead viewers to extrapolate their own interpretations and significances. Much of his work is implicitly an exploration of what robots can be outside the boundaries of industrial, military, and popular preconceptions.  Making these machines and robots requires a synthesis of technology, choreography, animation, and a sense of awe of the inner-workings of the natural world, both its macroscopic, dynamic morphologies and the algorithmic underpinnings of the systems we call life. 

www.ingramclockworks.com

Gunnhildur Una Jonsdottir explores a magical reflection of reality through storytelling and drawing.  In the show Findings she exhibits a video projection of computer based drawings with a voice over narration.  Her stories all have a root in reality, but Gunnhildur examines how memory and history merge with fiction, when presented in this way.

guj@andrew.cmu.edu

www.gunnhildurjonsdottir.com

David Tinapple's work is provoked by the flood of images that wash over us in our media environment. He focuses in on the ways we relate to these images by re-configuring and re-aligning our perception. In this exhibition he shows videos that extract only the breathing from a presidential debate, and only the silences from television. He projects video onto specific objects, wrapping them tightly with moving images. Another device requires the viewer to be viewed, asking us to complete a circuit and enter into a chain of perceptions. Tinapple's work illuminates and confronts the subtle forces at work around us.

www.davidtinapple.com