Max Almy & Teri Yarbrow
Max Almy & Teri Yarbrow Biography
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”, “Phoenix-Rising”, the “Ascent” series and the “Portal” series 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.
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 abstract structure. 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 and installations include Fresh Paint, LA, Gebert Contemporary, LA, Eileen Braziel Fine Arts, the Santa Fe Convention Center, 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, an artist purchase award from the New Mexico a numerous Gold BDAs, PROMAX Gold and Silver Awards, the Dorothy Arzner Directors's Award, Silver Hugo Award Chicago International Film Festival, Silver Medal New York Film Festival, Marin County National Video Festival, Special Jury Award Houston International Film Festival.
Max Almy & Teri Yarbrow Description
Max Almy and Teri Yarbrow's
Tara Mandala is the sixth work in the Portal series. Each work explores the concept of an aperture to a mystery. In this case, the opening explores a vision of ecstatic multiplicity that glows through an elaborately cut opening in a patinated copper surface.
In
Tara Mandala, Max Almy and Teri Yarbrow are exploring experimental combinations of light, pattern, texture, movement, ancient imagery and very contemporary technology. The heavily patinated copper surface is digitally cut using precise water jet technology. The evocative video imagery that glows through the metal surface is created using digital and particle animation software.
The processes utilized in creating the work involve chance, change and impermanence. The chance processes of chemical reactions on copper and the mathematical generation of particle animations in creating the digital imagery.
Max Almy & Teri Yarbrow Statement
Teri Yarbrow and Max Almy are Emmy, AFI and NEA award winning internationally exhibited video and installation artists known for pushing the boundaries of art and technology. Their complex installations seamlessly combine video, constructed surfaces, painting, digital imagery, flat screens and video projection to create dramatic, mesmerizing works. Their works have been featured in major museums, festivals, screenings and collections throughout the world including: MOMA, NY, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, LA, Ars Electronica, Austria, SIGGRAPH, the Stedelijk Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the New Museum, the Whitney and many more.
