Institute of Contemporary Art

118 S. 36th Street
University of Pennsylvania campus
ph: 215-898-5911 fax: 215 898-7108
web: http://www.icaphila.org
Hours: 12 - 8 pm Wednesday - Friday; 11 am - 5 pm Saturday and Sunday.
Admission: $3 for adults; $2 for students over 12, artists, and senior citizens
Free to ICA members, children 12 and under, and on Sundays from 11am - 1:00 pm

About the Exhibit

Walkthrough: Friday, March 1, 5 pm Bennett Simpson, Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow will lead an exhibition walkthrough of "Shoot the Singer"; many artists included in the exhibition will be present.

Opening reception: Friday, March 1, 6 - 8 pm

"Shoot the Singer," curated by Bennett Simpson, ICA's Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow for 2001-2002, gathers a range of contemporary video works that are organized by the contexts, politics, and images of pop music. The exhibition includes works by local and international artists spanning the past two decades, a period of intense overlap between the communities and practices of music and art, especially in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and London. In contrast to the offerings of MTV, first aired in 1981, the works included here are not slick vessels of commercial spectacle. They are, variously, documents of subcultures, art world allegories and analyses of music industry logic. Among others, "Shoot the Singer" presents videos by Art & Language (featuring the Red Crayola), Dara Birnbaum, Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Nick Payne & Oliver Relph, and Susan Smith-Pinelo.

Bennett Simpson's recent curatorial projects include: "Where: Allegories of Site in Contemporary Art," at the Whitney Museum at Champion, Stamford, CT (1998); "The Production of Production," co-curated with Tim Griffin at Apex Art, New York (1999); and a soundtrack and audio installation for "Elysian Fields" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2000). A widely published critic, Simpson's writing has appeared in Artforum, Art-text, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, and Purple, where he is associate editor. Simpson was a 1997-1998 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and did his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Virginia.

Funding support has been provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Dietrich Foundation Inc., the Board of Overseers for the Institute of Contemporary Art, friends and members of the ICA, and the University of Pennsylvania.