THE SELF-PORTRAIT SHOW
GROUP EXHIBITION
OPENING RECEPTION:
Thursday, May 14th, 1997 6:00 - 8:00 pm
at Echo Communications Group, 179 Franklin Street
4th Floor
phone: (212) 292-0910

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The Self-Portrait show features the self-portraits of over 20 famous echoids.
Come admire the works and guess who's who from the entries.

  • Anynomous
    I cherish my antipodal Internet friends. The remote nature of our relationships suits me. And sometimes it denudes me. Thus, I submit a sketch of my bare crotch. Skip the superficial. Go from the darkest regions of my mind to the darkest regions of my underpants. As I sketched, an imp with an A La Souvarov emerged from the pencil marks. Do you see him?

  • Jim Baumbachjimb@echonyc.com
    "Who am I?" unlike, say, "Who invented the cotton gin?" admits a multitude of answers depending on point of view, the medium in which the answer is given, the competence of the respondant in that medium, the moment in time the question is asked, and what the respondant is trying to hide and from whom.

    Who I am, as opposed to, say, what my name is, can only be answered approximately, biased by perspective, restricted by the limits of the language used to respond and my fluency in it, how the static moment represents continuous time, and how much I'm willing to share--even with myself.

    I am not a rational number, or even a sequence of real numbers, or any finite representation which is why idolatry is a sin. My view of myself is no better than yours, though it is different, and I may be more motivated to pay attention.

    I cannot help but express myself even when I try not to because then I express my attempt to hide. But an expression of myself differs from who I am which is inexpressable, though at a given moment, you might just know anyway.

    I tried to capure what I looked like in the mirror and each attempt both failed and succeeded in various ways for various reasons, some of which may be said to be my fault and others not.

    I thought I could create a likeness of myself if I could remove what I thought I looked like and what I wanted to look like from between me and my attempt. But I could only do that in part.

  • Bill Gibbons gibbo@echonyc.com
    This painting is only a self portrait in the most general way. It doesn't really look like me, but it does reflect my mood on a day when everything is going wrong and there's nothing to do except get through it. I made the painting by climbing up a ladder and dropping a mixture of pink and white and orange onto the green background to make a big splatter. Then with black paint in a squeeze bottle I drew the face of a man doing his best to cope with a messy situation.

  • Kiersta Gostnell gostnell@echonyc.com
    I made this piece when I was pregnant with my son Sam. I wasn't consciously thinking of him, but in retrospect, he was so much a part of me that it portrays both of us --a portrait of enchantment and metamorphosis. Now that Sam is three, real life has caught up with the last panel of the piece - a young woman diving in, to find the little boy running gleefully on the other side.

  • Melissa Gould mego@echonyc.com
    MeGo is what she eats.

  • Nancy Graham ngraham@echonyc.com
    This nightlight started as a collage in my journal and the image of the burning woman with a doll's face persists as a powerful one for me. My grandmother died in a hotel fire when my mother was 14. This portrait signifies the impact on my mother's life, and subsequently mine, of having lost her mother so young and so violently, while offering the comfort and safety promised by a nightlight. I think also of the phrase "burning with enthusiasm," since the loss of my grandmother, perhaps, acted as a snuff on ecstatic emotions in my family. When I look at it I always hear the gospel tune, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine..."

  • Stacy Horn horn@echonyc.com
    I took the self-portrait (a photograph) 23 years ago, when I was 19 and a college student at Ohio University. I was trying to show how scared I felt at the time. The only comments I got at the show were from my male friends who said I was "hot." This depressed me because, well, I don't look like that anymore.

  • miss maura johnston maura@maura.com
    My piece is a comment on my desire to constantly reinvent myself physically, whether it's through a new haircut, different clothes, a new shade of lipstick, or just becoming completely invisible (cf. the crossed-out picture). Of course, none of these pictures come out looking like *me* in the end, but that just might be the point -- I'm always on the lookout for ways to be not me.

  • Noa Jones jonesink@jps.net
    It is past midnight at MMC Communications. I've turned off the fluorescent lights and removed my shoes. The heat had been shut off. I sit bundled up and computer-blue-in-the-face finalizing a media alert. The room is lit by the glowing picture window -- white snow falling in resolute diagonal lines. Park Avenue is vacant. I like it like this. Soon I will escape this corporate abattoir to assume a life of my own design. Under the surveillance of faces trapped in frames on the darkened desks of my coworkers, I flip open the scanner bed and close my eyes...

  • Henry Lowengard jhhl@panix.com For the Self- Portrait in the green frame:
    For many years, I have been fascinated by the rather primative yet eyecatching form of computer art known today as ASCII-ART. From its humble origins in oft-reproduced renderings of the Mona Lisa, Snoopy and various Playmates, ascii-art survives as a kind of a computer folk-art. This self-portrait went through many stages:

    • Drawn on an Amiga in DPaint III
    • Converted to Ascii-Art via my own program pnmtoasc
    • Laboriously typed on an old Royal typewriter
      This last stage adds the quality of manual craftsmanship to the piece, and was also necessary because I don't have a printer!

    ---- ngraham (Nancy Graham) and I did a comic as a kind of dual self portrait: This comic was drawn in bed - documenting parts of our life together in the Spring and Summer of 1997. Doing these pages has become an occasional sleepytime ritual during which we reminisce, record silly jokes and mark the passing of time. Since Nancy is a leftie and Henry a rightie, we split the page and avoid knocking elbows. Some of our other drawings and animation can be found on our websites.

  • Knut Mork knut@gar.no
    Self-Portrait #27: A Computer's-Eye View
    First: this is a humorous piece. I once showed it to a group of people, and after an embarrassed silence one of them asked: "Is it OK to laugh?" "A Computer's-Eye View" is part portrait-of-the-artist-as-an-Internet-geek, part parody of today's trend of self-documenting art. My main interest was to render visible a large part of my daily life which is completely unseen - my movements and expressions in front of the computer screen. Since making the piece I've moved my mouse over 40km(!), and I wanted to commemorate this part of my existence which is otherwise only witnessed by the silent monitor.

  • M.R. Petit merpy@merpy.com
    I am exhibiting a children's book entitled "Merpy and the Monsters." It is a long and complicated path to making this book, basically starting with a decision 7 months earlier to stop making art entirely. But, the idea came to me in February, with another book entitled "Jeremy Dragonfly" and suddenly I found myself having fun in a way I hadn't experienced in a few years. I found I was both surprised and laughing. I hope it lasts!

  • Minou Roufail roufail@echonyc.com
    My self-portrait was a magazine clipping sent to me by a friend about fifteen years ago. It reproduces a print of Franz Liszt, and, since I really do look like him, my friend drew a big exclamation point at the top. Back then I wore men's suits, although they were not tailored like Liszt's. It makes me sad to think that I went around in such ill-fitting suits, but then again, I wasn't a court musician.

    I'm not an artist, and my only input was to have the clipping framed (by Mascot Studio on East 5th St.---they do a very good job). By the way, I was not interested in any kind of profundity associated with appropriation art. The picture operates at the most superficial level of self-portraiture. It's just a likeness, and it says something about how my friend saw me when we were young.

  • Joe Rosen joro@echonyc.com
    They serve to illustrate the new me. Extremely low resolution photos snapped with a pocket sized digital camera on a Mt. Tam Trail and printed on a bad b&w printer. They represent my slow but steady transformation into a Ted Kazinsky type, destined to eventually live out my days in a remote Mountain Cabin where i'll plot revenge on society.

  • Janet Tingey tingey@echonyc.com
    I had two portraits in the show. Both were simply student work, of the learning-how-to-draw-the-human-figure with a dearth of models. There's really not a lot more to say about them.

  • Gail Vachon vachon@echonyc.com
    In The Sciene Times I came across something called "The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale" which consists of 10 statements--5 worded positively and 5 negatively. Respondents are asked to rate how they reflect their own feelings about themselves--"strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree" and their final tally is supposed to indicate their level of self esteem.

    I agreed strongly with all the statements--self loving and self hating-- as I think most people would (most Echoids anyway). So I printed them by hand on a nice piece of paper, and called it a self-portrait.

  • Kathy Dee Zasloff kdz@pasa.org
    My self-portrait is part of a series I have been working for over ten years called, "Stories Telling Themselves." As an artist I am dedicated to letting the stories in my life tell themselves through my art. I collect and arrange my art so a current part of the story can be heard and seen. My self-portrait tells a story of the work I am doing with beads and animals. My intention was to bring together elements of the work in a moment of fun and playfulness.


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