Max Almy and Teri Yarbrow
MAX ALMY
Max Almy is an award winning, internationally recognized and exhibited video, digital media and installation artist. She has experimented with video, film, computer and interactive media in works ranging from large-scale multi-media installations to single channel works for exhibition and broadcast. Her works are characterized by experimental narrative structure, compelling visual imagery and content that comments on contemporary life.
Her early video works like “Leaving the 20th Century”, 1979, and “Perfect Leader”, 1984, explored the complexity of post-modern attitudes toward technology, media, and social issues. Her award-winning installation, “Utopia”, 1996, produced in collaboration with Teri Yarbrow, explored the social and environmental crisis of the modern city within the format of a dramatic interactive video game installation featuring Rachel Rosenthal. “Utopia” won a top award for interactive media arts at the Ars Electronica festival in Austria, was later featured at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in LA, SIGGRAPH, the Dallas Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival and was awarded one of Germany’s Internationaler Videokunstart Awards.
Her more recent works with Teri Yarbrow; “Dream House”, “The Museum of Disappearance” and “Phoenix-Rising” combine video projection, digital media, lighting, sound design and additional props. “Dream House” explores Economic Issues, Consumerism and the American Dream. “The Museum of Disappearance” addresses Environmental issues by creating a haunting science exhibit within a fictional museum of the future that displays virtually the species that no longer exist. “Phoenix-Rising” is a series of site specific installations that explore themes of social, political and spiritual rebirth and renewal.
As artists, Almy and Yarbrow have worked with leading design and architectural firms to imagine and design new media work for public spaces and location based entertainment projects. They have worked with Disney Imagineering and the Jerde Partnership on projects including Sony Metrion in San Francisco, National Geographic, Wash D.C., and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Her Awards and Honors include: an Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, an NEA Visual Artist Fellowship, an AFI Independent Filmmaker’s grant, a Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship, production grants from ORF-Austria, Sony Advanced Systems, Philips Interactive Media, Apple and numerous festival awards and honors.
Almy has exhibited in major museums and alternative art spaces throughout the world, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the New Museum, the Whitney Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the ICA, Boston, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the American Center, Paris, the Kitchen, LACE, and many more.Since the mid-70′s, she has participated in hundreds of festivals and screenings including: the Berlin Film Festival, Ars Electronica, the Venice Biennale, Art Futura, Spain, the National Video Festival, USA, SIGGRAPH, the World Wide Video Festival, Den Hague, the Dallas Video Festival, the Atlanta Film and Video Festival, Women in Film Festival, the San Sebastion Film Festival, Spain, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, and many more.
TERI YARBROW
Teri Yarbrow is an artist who has worked extensively in video, digital media and oil painting. From 1975 to l982, she worked in various two dimensional media including oil painting, collage and print media. She was exploring a variety of approaches to process painting and abstractstructure. At this time, her works were featured in one woman and group exhibitions at: the Barnsdale Municipal Art Gallery, LA; the Hanson Gallery, San Franciso; the Hanson Gallery, New Orleans; the Center Gallery, N.Y.; California Institute of the Arts; the Cal State Northridge Faculty Show; Skidmore College, and the College of St. Rose.
In 1982, Yarbrow began exploring moving imagery with experimental approaches to video, film and computer imagery. The resulting series of works were exhibited in an extensive number of museums and festivals. In the mid-80′s, she also started a series of collaborative projects with video and new media artist, Max Almy. Together, she and Almy have participated in creating numerous multi-media installations and single channel video works. Highlights of Yarbrow’s exhibitions and screenings include: the Prix Ars Electronica, Austria; the Landesmuseum, Austria; SIGGRAPH; the Long Beach Museum; Art Futura, Spain; the Berlin Film Festival; the Videonale, Bonn; Video Shorts, Seattle; Australian Center for Contemporary Art; the American Film Institute; San Francisco Film Festival; the Hirschhorn Museum; the World Wide Video Festival, Den Hague; MOCA Geffen Contemporary, etc.
More recently, she has been involved with cutting edge new digital printing processes that combine painting with computer and digital manipulation. These mixed media digital works have been featured in a series of exhibitions in the installations, “Dream House”, “The Museum of Disappearance” and the internationally exhibited and award winning “Utopia”. In the summer of 2009, she exhibited “Phoenix-Rising”, a series of large scale, site-specific installations that combine painting and projected video.
Yarbrow has continued her focus on oil painting. Her paintings are dramatic explorations of shamanic imagery. Based on concepts of dream, myth and transformation, she has continued her in-depth work with process painting as an act of psychic excavation. Recent exhibitions include Eileen Braziel Fine Arts, The Patricia Carlisle Gallery, The California State University Northridge Gallery, and Klaudia Marr Gallery at the The Shack Obscura.
Her awards and honors include: an Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a numerous Gold BDAs, PROMAX Gold and Silver Awards, the Dorothy Arzner Directors’s Award, Silver Hugo Award Chicago International Film Festival, Silver Medal NewYork Film Festival, Marin County National Video Festival, Special Jury Award Houston International Film Festival.
“I am a mixed media artist working with paint and technology. I combine digital imagery; appropriated, manipulated, projected and animated. I experiment with inks, pigments, oil, add solvents and unusual ingredients like autumn leaves, gold dust, ash, rust and text. This multi-media approach provides a juxtaposition of imagery created by a collision of color, reflected light and everyday objects.
The themes of Immanence, Emanation, Multiplicity and Transformation are embedded in these works. I use symbols that emerge, as metaphors for the idea of inner journey: the self’s journey to the self. The destination is the place of transformation. I paint as a means of initiation and it is my intent that these paintings celebrate the strand of energy flowing through all things, rocks, water, animals, people, life itself.”