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PRESS RELEASE
Michael Smith and Joshua White
TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS!
September 9 through October 7, 2006
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition of collaborative work by Michael Smith and Joshua White. The opening of the exhibition, Take Off Your Pants! will take place on Saturday, September 9, 2006 from 6:00 PM until 8:00 PM. While Smith and White have exhibited their well-known collaborative installations in New York and Europe, this exhibition marks the first time that they have exhibited together in Texas, Both artists will be present for the opening, and the exhibition will continue through October 7, 2006.
For Take Off Your Pants!, Michael Smith and Joshua White have created a site-specific installation with a large-scale, nonsensical revolving kiosk. This multi-media, hexagonal kiosk comes alive as a childlike information booth that takes the viewer into several different virtual worlds. Videos, jingles, lenticular photos, spinning spiral disks, and elaborate colorful lighting are brought together to create the fictional game Take Off Your Pants!
The kiosk begins and ends with a lenticular photograph of an iconic representation of Michael Smith, a generic sweater-clad man and the only character in the game. In the first image, he stands fully clothed with his hands on his hips. In the second image, his arms flail over his head and his pants are around his ankles, revealing oversized red striped boxer shorts. The following panel, titled Pants Village, is a peculiar landscape where the sun rises and sets in a continuos loop. The kiosk also plays two videos, one of which is a commercial where a quirky television host tries to sell the game to children using catchy jingles.
This bizarre fun house with lights, monitors, and repetitive jingles promotes not only a game in which the winner is anyone who can make it home the fastest and take off their pants, but it also suggests a deeper, more disturbing message. Through its unsettling and annoying presence, Take Off Your Pants! shifts from a seemingly benign child-friendly environment to an exaggeration of advertising strategies often aimed at children. Furthermore, an image of the characterless Michael Smith sitting in front of his computer in his boxer shorts underscores the role of the Internet in our daily lives. Smith and White present a world in which the very interactivity that is championed by the Internet, in fact, makes the viewer completely inactive in his or her life. Often hours sitting at a computer are consumed, before one realizes that they are still in their underwear.
Michael Smith lives and works in Austin, Texas, as well as Brooklyn, New York. He received his Bachelor of Arts from The Colorado College and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Smith has shown his work extensively around the U.S, Canada, and Europe, including solo shows at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has received numerous awards including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2007 Regency Art Press will be publishing a book of his drawings, and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas will present a survey show of over twenty years of work titled, Mike: Solo and Collaborative Works by Michael Smith and Joshua White.
Joshua White lives and works in New York. He is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University and USC Film School. White is very well known for his light shows, which he performed at Fillmore East, Woodstock and more recently at The Hirshhorm Museum of Art. He has also worked in commercial television on shows for Cinemax, HBA, MTV and The TV Food Network. His artwork has been included in prestigious group shows at Het Fries Museum in the Netherlands, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Tate Modern, London, England.
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 am until 5:00 pm and by appointment. Please contact Sarah Stork at the gallery or via e-mail at sstork@dunnandbrown.com for additional information or to request visuals of the exhibition.