Rebeca Bollinger
Rebeca Bollinger is an American artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, video, photography, drawing, installation and performance. Her work employs unconventional materials and processes through which she aggregates, fragments, re-translates or juxtaposes images and objects, in order to examine the creation of meaning, information and memory. She began her art career amid cultural shifts in the 1990s, and her work of that time engages the effects of the early internet on image production and display, systems of ordering, and the construction of identity. Her later work has shifted in emphasis from images to objects, employing similar processes to give form to invisible forces, memories, ephemeral phenomena, and open-ended narratives. Bollinger has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, and Orange County Museum of Art. Her work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and belongs to the public art collections of SFMOMA, de Young Museum, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others.
Life and career
Bollinger was born and raised in Los Angeles. After earning her BFA, she attracted critical and institutional attention for her early work. Between 1995–7, she exhibited at The Lab, SFMOMA, Art in the Anchorage, Museum Fridericianum, ISEA International, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and San Jose Museum of Art. In more recent years, she has shown at the Walter Maciel, Rena Bransten and Feigen Contemporary galleries, Mills College Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, and Gallery 16, and in group exhibitions at Ballroom Marfa, Pacific Film Archive and Asian Art Museum. In 2005, she joined the faculty of California College of the Arts, teaching there until 2018.Work
Critics characterize Bollinger's work by its conceptual and aesthetic economy and exploration of unexpected materials, processes and combinations. She often enacts translations between different media and modes of representation and abstraction, individual and aggregate, order and randomness, and ephemerality and concreteness.Early work: archives, sculpture, video
Bollinger first gained notice for her video Alphabetically Sorted, a computer-screen scroll of 644 alphabetized keywords that signified erotic content on a CompuServe photography forum called "Plain Brown Wrapper," which were read by Victoria: High Quality, an early Apple PlainTalk electronic voice. New York Times critic Roberta Smith noted the work's sociological slant and "surprisingly inflected" narration suggesting "a kind of found poetry."In 1995, Bollinger began imprinting downloaded portraits from early websites onto baked goods using a commercial baking printer called the Sweet Art Machine. These sculptures and installations featured shrink-wrapped cookies bearing children's faces, cakes iced with likenesses of celebrities, and pieces of unleavened bread featuring anonymous America Online photos, stapled to walls, displayed on shelves and as floor tiles, or boxed to overflow. Critics described them as both "eerie" portraits whose printed imperfections suggested impermanence and the fragility of identity, and as critical objects whose food and icing metaphors commented on the contemporary appetite for information, the blurring of private and public, and the superficiality of media.
In the later 1990s, Bollinger explored digital archiving and display, revealing imperceptible structures, affinities and cultural assumptions built into the seemingly neutral ordering processes of an image-saturated culture. The "Similar/Same" series featured manually aggregated, internet images based on search terms, which she translated into wall-sized, gridded videos and more intimate, humanized colored-pencil-drawing installations.
In 1999, the de Young Museum invited Bollinger to create The Collection , a site-specific video installation that translated the museum's 60,000-image database into a swiftly scrolling artwork organized by collection, type and year, which suggested the impersonal movement of history. Reviewer Kenneth Baker described it as a "hypnotic visual spectacle"; Glen Helfand wrote that its "dazzling mosaics of colors and shapes" revealed the enormity of the museum's holdings and raised questions about how contemporary audiences see art. The museum purchased the work in 1999 and commissioned Bollinger to rework it for their new building in 2005.
Later work: photography, sculpture
In the 2000s, Bollinger began creating a repository of her own digital photographs of everyday subjects, which she catalogued and presented in video projections and works on paper exploring uncertainty, the fragmentation of experience, and randomness. The video projection Fields presented this archive as an aesthetic experience unfurling in staccato fashion, while the "Index" print series translated it into fractured compositions and meditative fields organized by time and color. Critics suggest that the structuring of the work outside human aesthetic judgments and hierarchies enabled surprising forms of beauty reminiscent of the rhythms and randomness of John Cage compositions.Bollinger's "Straight Photos"—titled for their lack of digital manipulation—blurred distinctions between photography and painting, foreground and background, familiar and foreign by mixing painterly abstraction, wavering perspectives, clear representation, and unconventionally produced random, unfocused fields of refracted light. Captured with a telephoto lens, the banal, abstracted landscapes, which sometimes include sharp-focused, unwitting passersby, include an element of voyeurism that Bollinger relates to the street photography of Cartier-Bresson. In Here to There, she extended this work into sculptural space, projecting sequences of multiple images onto a freestanding wall with raised wood boxes to form collage-like wholes that combined Cubist-like fragmentation with cinematic duration and dissolves.
Beginning in 2010, Bollinger increasingly translated two-dimensional images and ephemeral experiences into three-dimensional space and physical objects. Using photography as a structural base to extract shapes and abstractions, she produced works such as Color Study, which combined an unfocused photograph with glazed ceramic elements, recalling early Cubist collage while suggesting the implied space of an abstract painting come to life. In later sculpture, installations and performances, she aggregated materials and objects—found ephemera, ceramic, glass, bronze or poured aluminum elements, imprinted cork boards, and writing—much as earlier work aggregated images. The show "The Burrow" offered unexpected juxtapositions that evoked the lives of objects and elusive, the labyrinthine quality of memory, and enigmatic, non-linear narratives that Sculpture Magazine described as "hauntingly idiosyncratic."