Fluent~Collaborative is pleased to announce testsite 04.4, a collaboration between artist Annette Lawrence and writer Annette Carlozzi.
For the past ten years, Annette Lawrence has, among other bodies of work, created room-sized string installations whose ephemeral geometries transform exhibition spaces. After each installation, Lawrence and her assistants have rolled the string into fist-sized balls to be stored, then added to and re-used in subsequent works. Envisioning her testsite installation as a reprise of the last decade's worth of responding to space, Lawrence will install these 95 balls of string on one wall, leaving the remaining physical space undisturbed. A history of Lawrence's past string installations will be available in documentary images, casually placed in the room.
Annette Carlozzi's written voice varies considerably in response to particular works of art. About a year ago, she began experimenting with poetic formats for texts about work that is body-centered and informed by music. For this testsite collaboration, she invited Annette Lawrence to create a site-specific work and proposed to write a prose poem that would allude to the rich and complicating layers in Lawrence's art. The idea of words-as-threads, which guided the selection of the collaborating partner, has evolved into the creation of a sound piece--where, in essence, a web of words will fill the space and complement its inspiration, the quiet and self-contained string sculpture.
Carlozzi and Lawrence have invited Austin-based poet Ana Sisnett to perform the sound portion of this installation. A limited edition CD will be produced in conjunction with the collaboration.
Annette Lawrence is a visual artist currently working in a range of two and three-dimensional media. Presently an Associate Professor of Painting/Drawing in the School of Visual Arts at The University of North Texas (Denton, Texas), Lawrence's work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at such spaces as the Glassell School of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the African-American Museum in Dallas, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Sweeney Art Gallery at UC-Riverside. Group exhibitions include: The 1997 Whitney Biennial; time/frame at the Blanton Museum of Art, UT-Austin; The Texas Collection, Modern - Postmodern, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Gender: Fact or Fiction, at Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin; and Other Narratives, at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Annette Lawrence was born in Rockville Center and grew up in Queens and Freeport, New York. She received her BFA from the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut in 1986 and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland in 1990.
Annette DiMeo Carlozzi writes about contemporary art and is based in Austin, Texas. Carlozzi has over twenty-five years' experience as a museum and alternative space director, arts producer, and curator of contemporary art at institutions in Minneapolis, Austin, Aspen, New Orleans, and Atlanta. She has curated or produced artist projects with Vito Acconci, Siah Armajani, Tony Cragg, Betye Saar, Yukinori Yanagi, Eduardo Kac, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Holt, Mel Chin, Tina Girouard, Byron Kim, Ellen Gallagher, Luis Jimenez, Peter Saul, Fabian Marcaccio, Terry Adkins and many others, and periodically studies with dancer/choreographer Deborah Hay. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogues, including those that have accompanied the more than 40 exhibitions of modern and contemporary art that she has curated to date. Her special interests include making the way clearer for emerging and under-recognized artists, creating artist commissioning opportunities, and presenting rigorous contemporary art to a diverse range of audiences. Annette Carlozzi is currently Senior Curator of American & Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin.
