Mary Ellen Carroll Federal, State, County and City (The Deferment of Impatience and Motor Responses to Being in California with Laura ’Riding’ Jackson, Florence Knoll, Kruder and Dorfmeister, José Feliciano and Gertrude Stein) Exhibition dates: March 23 – May 19, 2012 Media Contact: Yona Backer and Anna Stein yona@thirdstreaming.com , anna@thirdstreaming.com or 646-370-3877

Special Performance Thursday, March 8, 2012, 6-8pm José y José (California Dreamin’)

Saturday, March 24 – Sunday, March 25 24 hour screening of Federal at the Museum of the Moving Image www.movingimage.us

I am counting on the original material to exhibit its intrinsic naturalness as content—on its needing no special justification in its reappearance as entitled to perennial interest as material of art. - Laura 'Riding' Jackson Third Streaming is proud to present Federal, State, County and City (The Deferment of Impatience and Motor Responses to Being in California with Laura ’Riding’ Jackson, Florence Knoll, Kruder and Dorfmeister, José Feliciano and Gertrude Stein) by conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll. Using writer Laura 'Riding' Jackson’s quotation as a preface and departure point, Federal, State, County and City… brings together Carroll’s earlier work – reappearances – and new pieces that are being shown for the first time. The exhibition unites these selections through the common thread of California, and includes four projects that incorporate photography, printmaking and performance art. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum of the Moving Image is pleased to announce the screening of Federal, a 24-hour, two-theater movie by Carroll that will run from 9am on Saturday, March 24th to 9am on Sunday, March 25th, 2012. Introducing the exhibition is a performance by Carroll entitled José y José (California Dreamin’), 2012, based on singer/songwriter José Feliciano’s cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” The project began with José y José, 2007, a photo-based work of Feliciano sitting on a stool playing his guitar, which was reproduced on the inside cover of his album Alive Alive-O!. To complete José y José, Carroll has invited Feliciano to perform a live cover of The Doors’ song “Touch Me,” which is then to be covered later in the evening by a second special guest. Carroll’s José y José thus plays with the idea of the musical cover, and in turn with issues of authenticity and reappropriation. The performance is the final

Federal, 2003

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project in Carroll’s stream of consciousness/Rube Goldberg series, My death is pending because, that began in 1983 and was exhibited at Third Streaming in 2010. While José y José (California Dreamin’) sets the stage for Federal, State, County and City’s ties to California, Carroll’s Federal, 2003, provides the backbone of the exhibition in both name and concept. The series features the Federal Building in Los Angeles, designed in 1969 by the architect Charles Luckman, which houses the FBI and various other governmental departments. Federal, the movie, evolved out of a series that Carroll started in 1990 when she began to photograph every federal building in the United States. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent increased security measures ended this photo series, and the decision was made to continue the Federal project by shooting the 24-hour, two-theater movie of the Los Angeles Federal Building, the western headquarters of the U.S. government. It took a year and a half for Carroll to complete the paperwork necessary to execute the project, and the movie was finally shot from 9am on July 28th, 2003 to 9am the following day. A series of photographs was also taken every hour, on the hour, with a medium format camera, the entirety of which is on display in Federal, State, County and City. Federal powerfully invokes duration and repetition, especially as they relate to boredom and endurance on the part of the artist and of the viewer. While the photo series only documents the northern façade of the building, the movie gives viewers the opportunity to watch either side of the building, though never at the same time, giving Federal a sense of the freedom of choice. In reality, however, the work imposes a strict, constructed viewpoint that mirrors the same set of choice-restrictions that go unnoticed in everyday life. As a 24-hour movie and photo series, Carroll’s Federal also probes the government’s complicity and willingness to be filmed over an entire day; the tables have been turned so that those normally responsible for surveillance are being watched themselves. In this way, the process of observation is just as much a part of Federal as the resultant video and images. The importance of process in Federal is a central tenet for the rest of Carroll’s oeuvre. In Kruder and Dorfmeister, 2000, Carroll photographed every pubic library in the city limits of Los Angeles using a Polaroid Automatic Land Camera – Model 350. All 66 photographs are displayed in Federal, State, County and City, creating a catalogue of these edifying public buildings that seems antithetical to the pop culture, Hollywood aesthetic of Los Angeles. As in Federal, Carroll’s investigation of important democratic spaces in Kruder and Dorfmeister brings to light issues of accessibility and refuge, questioning the discrepancies between intent and public use. The title of the series references an Austrian DJ duo of the same name, whose electronic, lounge aesthetic befittingly adds a touch of cinematic gloss to Carroll’s Los Angeles library expedition. While Federal and Kruder and Dorfmeister derive much of their meaning from the specifics of place and the connotations of Los Angeles, Carroll’s series Nowhere, 2002, relies on the opposite phenomenon – the condition of being nowhere. Originally, the series was to feature a selection of photographs that Carroll took while on an intentionally unpleasant cruise to the middle of the ocean. When she picked up the resultant images from the photolab, she discovered that the technician had mistakenly included an extra set of photographs from someone else’s beach vacation amongst her images of the Pacific Ocean. Assessing that the photos were most likely taken somewhere in Greece, Carroll took the images to the Greek Consulate in hopes of identifying the island setting. The consulate could not deduce the locale, and neither could a number of travel agencies Carroll later consulted. The photographs were, in effect, taken nowhere, existing in a liminal state between identity and absence.

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To expand on the experience of the mistake, Carroll worked with Brand X Editions to realize the special edition prints of the unknown photographs, printed in reverse as large silkscreens on vellum and folded numerous times. The resultant work implies chance, pleasure and nostalgia; the photographs appear continually found, unfolded and rediscovered, but never become more familiar than the souvenir of someone else’s journey.

Mary Ellen Carroll lives and works in NYC and Houston, Texas. She has been investigating a single, fundamental question throughout her oeuvre: what do we consider a work of art? The results are a multifarious, provocative and often wry outpouring in performance, theatre, architecture, writing, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture and painting. prototype 180, for example, is a conceptual work of art and urban alteration that entails a radical form of renovation through the physical rotation and reoccupation of a single family house in Houston, TX. In conception and planning for over 10 years, the project is temporally, physically and structurally organized around its catalytic rotational transformation. prototype 180 strategically intersects conceptual art projects, social activism, urban legislation and economic processes. Its 180-degree reorientation registers aesthetically against a history of critical house alterations and administratively in relation to Houston’s unregulated land use policies and absence of zoning.

Mary Ellen Carroll’s prolific career spans more than twenty years and a range of practices from art to architecture to performance and film. Carroll is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Graham Foundation Fellowship for prototype 180 and Innovation Territories in 2010, and AIA’s Artist of the Year Award, 2010. She has also received a Pollack/Krasner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a grant from the Pennies from Heaven Fund.

Her works is currently on view in FEAST, The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago and upcoming shows include the Busan Bienial in Korea and in Love and Africa, The Menil Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at numerous American and international galleries, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; ICA, Philadelphia; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; ICA, London; Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich; and MOMUK, Vienna. A monograph of her work, published by SteidlMACK (London and Gottingen), received the AIGA’s 2010 Book of the Year Award.

Federal was created with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship that Carroll received in 2003, and with technical and material contributions by the Panasonic Corporation, Strypmonde Foundation, Outpost Digital and Michael Isabell of Eyespy Films. The screening at the Museum of the Moving Image has been made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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