For his exhibition at Hallwalls, Buffalo artist Michael Bosworth has taken up the challenge of a second recycling of gallery installation materials, applying an adaptive reuse methodology to a previously-constructed space within Hallwalls' gallery. Remaining as true to the given set of source materials as possible, Bosworth will be reconfiguring leftover drywall and studs into a sculptural, site-specific installation.

Key sculptural elements in the planned mis en scene will be a trebuchet, a gatehouse, a wall, a throne, and what at first appears to be walled ruins but on further inspection reveal themselves to be qr codes. QR codes are a visual matrix decipherable by barcode readers and, more recently, smart phone bar code apps. Whereas Bosworth has in the past often created entirely immersive image-based environments using old negatives, film projections, and handmade projectors, his plans for the current project are centered upon an immersive sculptural landscape, within which images are embedded and hiding in plain sight.

Bosworth's proposed exhibition and the objects and images therein promise to center the viewer in the midst of an apparent armed rebellion, which seems more than topical for the spring of 2011. There will be no avoiding the allusion to demolished regality in Bosworth's installation, though his use of this thematic trope is connected more to the notion that a rebellion of some sort is always taking place, rather than connote any specifically current situation.

The installation will have a double life, that of immersive physical space and that of not-immediately-viewable imagistic space. Images and their meanings will literally be encoded and reveal themselves only through the application of specific technology. Meanwhile, the physicality of the space and its objects will evoke a siege mentality and allude to the submerged transformative powers of perpetual, ongoing change.

Michael Bosworth received his MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico, a BFA in Art and a BA in English from the University at Buffalo. Recently a part of Beyond/In WNY 2010, he has exhibited work at galleries such as the Sean Kelly Gallery(New York, NY), Burchfield-Penney Art Center(Buffalo, NY), Visual Studies Workshop(Rochester, NY), Rochester Contemporary Art Center(Rochester, NY), O'Connor Gallery of Art(Chicago, Il), Big Orbit Gallery(Buffalo, NY), CEPA Gallery(Buffalo, NY), and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery(Buffalo, NY). His Commissioned public art project include the Main Street/Art Street Windows Project and Herd About Buffalo. Bosworth is currently a Professor in the Photography Department of Villa Maria College in Buffalo, NY.

www.aesthetocracy.com

Some publications related to this event:
MICHAEL BOSWORTH: PAPER WALLS - 2011