Edwina Ashton and Zhao Liang
April 10 – May 1, 2004
Opening reception: Saturday, April 10, 2004
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present the New York gallery debuts of Edwina Ashton and Zhao Liang. Recent videos by each artist will screen consecutively in the gallery.
Ashton, based in London, creates videos and drawings populated by a motley crew of animals, real and imagined, enacting humdrum scenarios. Dale Macfarland writes: “There is a touching humor about these pieces and Ashton’s eye for detail is utterly compelling, but there is also a mood of deferral and melancholia. She creates a feeling of nervous unease and, with the most limited of means, aptly communicates unfathomable predicaments and lonesome interior worlds.”
Zhao Liang, based in Beijing, merges documentary filmmaking techniques with images from popular culture to comment on the increasingly complicated relationship between Western and Chinese cultures. Philippe Vergne has written that “What is at stake in Zhao's method is the search for a shared language—a language capable of reaching an audience that is familiar with only one or the other category of experience....In Bored Youth (2000), using the format of music videos, Zhao films an actor running through the remnants of a traditional Beijing neighborhood that is in the process of being destroyed as a result of urban economic redevelopment.”
Edwina Ashton has exhibited widely in Europe, including recent solo exhibitions at hammersidi and Imperial College’s ArtLab in London and at Arnolfini, Bristol. A selection of her videos was screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, at the end of 2003. Recent group exhibitions include Inglesias Universalis at inIVA, London; and Videoidyll at the Staatesbank, Berlin. Zhao Liang has exhibited in film festivals and exhibitions around the world, including How Latitudes Become Forms at the Walker Art Center; China Contemporary Art Exhibition: Red Continent in Gwanju, South Korea; ARS 01 at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the 2001 New York Underground Film Festival; and the 2000 Microwave Festival in Hong Kong.
