LINCOLN, MA.- DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park opens the first major museum presentation of the collaborative work of choreographer and performer Ann Carlson and video installation artist Mary Ellen Strom. Through the lens of the historic record and art history, Carlson and Strom employ tactics of spectacle and humor to provide spaces of reflection about this contemporary moment. Carlson/Strom: New Performance Video will be on view at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park from January 24 through May 17, 2009.

Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom draw on the disciplines of dance and video art and public and conceptual art to create work that merges and expands the boundaries of each field. Both of these award-winning artists have been collaborating on multi-media projects since the early 1990s. Their work shares concerns for social engagement, historical criticality, and an exploration of the everyday that in turn defines their joint projects. For this exhibition Carlson and Strom will present four recent performance videos from 2007-2008 and debut a large-scale installation, Meadowlark, commissioned by DeCordova.

While elegant, sharply executed, and humorous, these performance videos are critical re-evaluations of cultural and historical narratives. Displayed as immersive projections or installations, Carlson and Strom’s work simultaneously fuses video art’s tendencies towards the visually spectacular and its legacy as a tool for social change. In that spirit, Carlson and Strom have turned and returned to the problematic nature and histories of the American landscape as an ongoing subject. Using the strategies of collaborative performance and time-based art work, they examine the moving body within a range of ”landscapes”: the physical western vista, the economic terrain of late-capitalist America, and the artistic tradition of constructing these literal and ideological images.

Thus, Frederic Remington’s 1908 painting, Indians Simulating Buffalo, is reinterpreted on the burnt and contested hills of the North Cheyenne Reservation in Montana to provide a Native American counter-narrative of the conquest of the “Wild West.” This newest work Meadowlark, was made with Northern Cheyenne video and performance artist Bently Spang and will be premiered in the DeCordova exhibition. Walter de Maria’s large-scale earthwork in the Mojave Desert, Two Parallel Lines or Mile Long Drawing, 1968, is doubled to four lines by immigrant construction workers as temporary marks on a beach, a liminal space of national identity, casting into question who exactly is allowed to leave lasting marks on this land. German artist Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance in a New York gallery with a live coyote that sought to address ”Spiritual America,“ is re-staged in a similar white-cube environment with a Holstein American industrial cow and a dancing Carlson.

Collectively, their recent work sets up pressing contemporary issues of national identities, environmental concerns, and economic disparities against the backdrop of historical representations of a national landscape. By using time-based forms of performance and video to ‘read through’ past art, Carlson and Strom create a temporal complex—compressing past and present to reveal intertwined trajectories of art, history, the body, and land.

Carlson/Strom: New Performance Video is being organized to mark a new exhibition direction for DeCordova and reiterates the Museum’s commitment to video and new media art and to artists that produce ground-breaking and socially important work.

Carlson/Strom: New Performance Video will be featured in the 2009 Boston CyberArts Festival, April 24 - May 17, 2009. The exhibit will be accompanied by a full-color, 48-page catalogue with essays by DeCordova Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch and artist, writer, and curator, Catherine Lord, Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to DeCordova, this exhibition has been funded by the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation, the Robert E. Davoli and Eileen McDonagh Charitable Foundation, LEF New England, and the Harpo Foundation.

Ann Carlson is a choreographer, performer, and conceptual artist whose award-winning work looks into the nature of the everyday. Carlson adapts and choreographs vernacular gestures into complex dances about the human experience. These dances are made with and performed by a broad range of individuals, including lawyers, day laborers, doctors, basketball players, fly-fisherman, and the custodial staff at an Ivy League college. Carlson received a 2009 USA Artist Fellowship, 2005/2006 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography.

Mary Ellen Strom is a video installation artist who uses collaboration, new media technologies, and art history to investigate the connected and submerged narratives of art, industry, nationalism, and cultural discourse. Strom chooses sites and subject matter in order to explore their meaning and potential for dialogue with the work. Accordingly, her installations have been exhibited in various sites including railroad cars, mountain faces, and more traditional museum venues. Strom was a recipient of the 2007 Artadia Award and has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, LEF, and Creative Capital. She is full-time faculty member of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.