by Meredith Wade
Daily Lobo
Nationally known visual artist Rebeca Bollinger, who participated in the Gale Memorial Lecture Series Thursday, said she makes her art by downloading portraits from the Internet and printing them on cookies, programs that allow the user to personalize images.
The lecture "Behind the New Surface: Reflections of Human Experience in New Media," provided Bollinger an opportunity to speak about her art and some of her latest work.
According to UNM assistant professor of art and art history Mary Tsiongas, the series is designed to feature speakers who are working with computer-based tools in an attempt to address artistic and human interests.
A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Bollinger, whose work has been featured in several venues including the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, emphasized that her work utilizes relationships that occur through repetition of similar images.
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In 1997, she began an interest in downloading portraits off the Internet. She would download the images and print them onto the surfaces of cookies.
"I felt that the temporary substrate of cookies seemed right for the subject of temporary images available on the Web," Bollinger said. She added that the cookies were incorporated into a collage of repeated images.
But Ballinger, whose background is primarily in painting, said the pieces she has created since her work with portraits and cookies demonstrates her interest in abstract visuals and the relationship of various forms.
"Panorama Streaming" was a video projection composed of blurred landscapes in a changing procession of patterns. The images themselves were distorted and unrecognizable, resulting in a mass of shape and color.
Bollinger continued exploring relationships of similar imagery in "Collection Descending." By arranging a museum's digital archive in groups of similar mediums and time periods, the artist created a virtual cascading waterfall. The work streams continuously in a 15-minute loop. Patterns emerge as the viewer is drawn into the ever-changing projection of images.
Bollinger has exhibited her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum and the Museum Fridericianum in Germany. She was a nominee for the 2001 Rockefellar Foundation New Media Fellowship, and was awarded a National Education Award presentation, accompanied by a creation grant funding her future work, and a Eureka fellowship.
The final speaker in the series will be Jim Campbell. His lecture is scheduled for Nov. 14 at 12 p.m. in Room 2018 in the College of Fine Arts.
For more information about the lecture series and participating speakers, contact the College of Fine Arts at 277-2111.
