Shimon Attie
Artist Statement
My practice spans video and video-installation, photography, site-specific media installations, performance, social practice, and public projects. In my work, I seek to explore how contemporary media may be used to reimagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity. I’m interested in how contemporary art can inflect and reinterpret social and political history, the body politic, personal and communal identity and affiliation, and more broadly, human memory and the imagination. This has sometimes involved engaging and enlisting local communities in finding new ways of representing their past, present, and potential futures. Some works engage issues related to loss, communal trauma, and the potential for regeneration, while others focus on speculative futures. In some pieces I’ve used contemporary media to reanimate sites with images of their own lost histories, while in others, I’ve engaged local community members to “perform” being protagonists in the creation of new self- and communal representations.
While At Headlands
I will treat my residency at the Headlands as a rich laboratory for exploring and pushing new ideas and directions in my work. This will include engaging in a large amount of experimentation and risk-taking that is necessary for my work to grow.
Immediately prior to my residency at the Headlands, I will have just completed a major site-specific public installation in the waterways around New York City. I therefore hope while in residence to incubate and re-connect with my studio practice.
I will engage in low-tech artistic experiments from which new strategies and ideas can emerge. I expect to be profoundly challenged by the more-than-extraordinary beauty of the Headlands landscape, which will also have a significant impact on my work. This could include creating site-specific pieces that reveal some of the cultural, psychological, and ideological narratives and imperatives that are latent within the local landscape.
