ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.- This spring CCS Bard presents a series of nine exhibitions at the CCS Galleries, curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies, including work by 44 internationally known contemporary artists. These exhibitions are the culmination of the students' work for the master's degree. Concurrently on view with these exhibitions in the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art is Second Thoughts, a response to Matthew Higgs's Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibitions of Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, featuring works by more than 70 artists.

The CCS Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Wednesdays through Sundays from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. All CCS Bard exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public. Transportation to and from New York City for the exhibition openings—March 16, April 13, and May 11—is available without charge, via a chartered bus. Reservations in advance are required; call 845.758.7598 or e-mail ccs@bard.edu.

Countdown - Artists: Urs Fischer, Jamie Isenstein, Kris Martin, Roman Signer, and Jordan Wolfson. Curator: Vincenzo de Bellis. Countdown brings together five sculpture-based artworks by Urs Fischer, Jamie Isenstein, Kris Martin, Roman Signer, and Jordan Wolfson that focus on their process of decay and disappearance. It presents works in which an "action"—either internal (such as the degradation of the materials) or external (when outside sources are catalysts for change) —will inevitably change the form of the works and cause their ineluctable demise. The works are either composed of organic materials or destined to decay (or otherwise perish) due to processes and conceptualizations that overtly address time, chance, beginnings and endings, ethics and commerce, production and consumption. These works have a life of their own beyond that of their makers, artists who cannot fully determine their progress, or prolong or safeguard their existence. A pear and an apple screwed together and hung from the ceiling by a nylon cord introduce the public to the exhibition space: Urs Fischer's Untitled, one of the most representative and iconic works by the Swiss artist. The organic element of the fruit composes a sculpture that will decay within days. Left in the exhibition space, the small sculpture is, in fact, submitted to the effects of the natural mutability of organic components from which it is made, changing its form and shape throughout the exhibition. Roman Signer's Sand Column is composed of eight to twelve buckets of sand that are stacked on top of on another like a column. The lowest bucket has a tiny hole in its side, approximately 10mm in diameter. Some sand leaks through it, and the column will thus become slanted and eventually fall over. Jordan Wolfson's Dreaming of the Dream of the Dream is 16mm film in which isolated clips of water from animated cartoons are organized as if in a condensed day cycle. The work is meant to be played during all exhibition hours, causing the image on the film itself to degrade slowly into nothingness. Once the image on the film has completely vanished or the film-stock has broken apart, the artwork will no longer exist. Jamie Isenstein's Inside Out Winter Hat Dance is composed of 300 pounds of ice piled in a cone shape with a top hat resting at its crown. During the course of days, the ice eventually melts, disappearing completely. The viewer is in the presence of a lifeless performance, played out by a figure whose capacity for animated physicality is indicated by the bare accoutrement of a top hat, which gradually descends when the ice melts. Kris Martin's 100 Years takes the form of a gold-plated steel ball. The shiny and perfect orb contains a mechanism of a bomb that will explode in a century. The object's beauty hides the obscure and disturbing nature of the work. The feeling of black humor, born of the artist's decision to delay the fate of his work so that his contemporaries could never witness this event, is nevertheless linked to a feeling of imminent catastrophe and violence.