This World & Nearer Ones
19 Public Art Commissions
on Govenors Island, NYC
Opening June 27, 2009






This map shows the home cities of the artists in THIS WORLD & NEARER ONES.
Please click the thumbtacks for more information.




Artist Bios



Edgar Arceneaux

(Born Los Angeles, 1972) Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Edgar Arceneaux is interested in the relationship between artistic processes, most often drawing, and psychology, physics, and philosophy. He has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Ulm, Germany; Galerie Kamm, Berlin; Frehrkring Wiesehoefer, Cologne; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York and the Project, New York.



AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs

(Born 1946 and 1963) live and work in New York, NY and Toronto, Canada.
AA Bronson founded General Idea with Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz in 1969. Bronson has since developed an independent practice that deals with trauma, loss, death, and healing. Currently he is Director of Printed Matter, Inc., New York. The MCA Chicago published his memoir, Negative Thoughts, in 2001. Peter Hobbs is a Canadian artist who uses performance and installation to create site-specific works that deal with history and sexuality. He has exhibited at Mercer Union in Toronto, Galerie 101 in Ottawa, Latitude 53 in Edmonton, the Hartnett Gallery at the University of Rochester, the Art Store in Tokyo, the Nunnery Gallery in London, and more.

Peter Hobbs is a Canadian artist who uses performance and installation to create site-specific works that deal with history and sexuality. He has exhibited at Mercer Union in Toronto, Galerie 101 in Ottawa, Latitude 53 in Edmonton, the Hartnett Gallery at the University of Rochester, the Art Store in Tokyo, the Nunnery Gallery in London, and more.


The Bruce High Quality Foundation

(Founded in 2004) Based in Brooklyn, New York.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation was created to foster an alternative to everything. Offering “amateur solutions to professional problems,” their previous projects include the Brucennial, 2008; a retrospective at the Susan Inglett Gallery; and a series of musical vignettes entitled Cats on Broadway, 2007.



Adam Chodzko

(Born 1965, London) Lives and works in Whitstable, Kent.
Adam Chodzko works in a range of media including video, installation art, performance, and drawing in a practice that combines the strategies of conceptualism, documentary film, anthropology, and surrealism. Chodzko’s work is in the collections of the Tate, The British Council, The Arts Council, the Saatchi Gallery, and numerous museums and private collections.



Tue Greenfort

(Born 1973, Denmark) Lives and works in Denmark and Berlin.
Tue Greenfort’s practice weaves links between public and private, corporate and personal, rural and urban worlds. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, his work is often direct in its institutional critique of global marketing and production practices. Greenfort has had solo shows at the Johann Koenig Gallery, Berlin; Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Witte de With, Rotterdam.



Jill Magid

(Born 1973, Connecticut) Lives and works in New York.
Jill Magid’s work often deals with themes surrounding urban environments and “engagement with place.” Magid's works opens up a new field of art and activism in which predictable forms of protest against the almighty eyes of power are turned into a dandy-like performance.



Teresa Margolles

(Born 1963, Mexico) Lives and works in Mexico City.
Teresa Margolles’ work examines the traces and relics left by death resulting from acts of violence in Mexico City. Informed by her training and occupation as a forensic technician in Mexico City, her work incorporates materials from the morgue and the dissecting room, such as blood, shrouds, and the water used to wash bodies before autopsies. In 2000 she was awarded an acquisition prize in the competition Cuerpo y Fruta of the French Embassy in Mexico City.



Anthony McCall

(Born Britain, 1946) Lives and works in New York.
British artist Anthony McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Filmmakers Co-op in the 1970s. After moving to New York in 1973, McCall developed his “solid light” film series, conceiving the now-legendary Line Describing a Cone, in 1973.



Nils Norman

(Born 1966 Kent, UK) Lives and works in London.
Nils Norman has developed his own mix of art and activism, examining histories of utopian thinking and ideas on alternative economic systems that can work within urban living conditions. Recent solo exhibitions include Degenerate Cologne, Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln 2006, Hey Rudy!: A Phantom on the Streets of Schizz, Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin 2003.



Susan Philipsz

(Born 1965, Glasgow) Lives and works in Berlin.
Susan Philipsz’s work investigates the spatial and emotive properties of sound. Interested in the tension between collective and personal memory, the artist often utilizes public address systems to project her own intimate, unaccompanied renditions of popular songs into public spaces. Philipsz was awarded the PS1 International Studio Program in New York, 2000, and the International Artists Programme at Art Pace, San Antonio, 2003.



Patti and Jesse Smith

(Born 1946 and 1987) Lives and works in New York.
Patti Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and artist who was a highly influential component of the punk rock movement, integrating the beat poetry performance style with three-chord rock. Called "punk rock's poet laureate", she brought a feminist and intellectual take to punk music. Smith is most widely known for the song Because the Night, which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. Aside from recording, performing, making art, and writing, Patti is strongly involved in social issues and continues to participate in various human rights organizations.



Tercerunquinto

(Founded in 1996) Based in Mexico City.
Tercerunquinto (translated roughly as "a third of a fifth") is a collective comprised of Julio Castro (b. 1976), Gabriel Cázares (b. 1978), and Rolando Flores (b. 1975). They are responsible for dozens of projects designed, in their words, “to question the boundaries between private and public space.” Their projects often take the form of discrete, thoughtful interventions in architecturesuch as their Enlargement of a Green Area in which they extended an existing grassy patch in a parking lot into an inviting lawn.



Tris Vonna-Michell

(Born 1982, U.K.) Lives and works in London.
Vonna-Michell is a young artist whose rapidly burgeoning career has developed through the popularity of his mixture of storytelling, performance, and installation, and the construction of personal responses to historical events. His work hahn/huhn (2004-2007) and Down the Rabbit-Hole (2006-2007) are narrated with a frantic and honest determination, so much so that, when he performs, it's almost as if he's trying to carve the reality of each story into the atmosphere of the room.



Mark Wallinger

(Born 1959, Chigwell, Britain) Lives and works in London.
Wallinger studied at Chelsea School of Art, London (1978-81) and Goldsmiths’ College, London (1983-85). Since the mid-1980s Wallinger’s primary concern has been to establish a valid critical approach to the “politics of representation and the representation of politics.” He was awarded the Turner Prize in 2007 and represented Britain at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.



Klaus Weber

(Born 1967, Germany) Lives and works in Berlin.
Klaus Weber works across a variety of media, manipulating everyday structures that intend to undermine the metaphorical and actual power of a functionalist rationality. Weber repeatedly uses images of nature and explores the sustainable potential of the untamable in a humorous and anarchic manner. He has participated in group shows such as Ecstasy: In and about Altered States, The Geffen Contemporary Art MOCA, Los Angeles; Manifesta 7; at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Secession Gallery, Vienna (2008).



Lawrence Weiner

(Born 1942, Bronx) Lives and Works in New York City and Amsterdam.
One of the central figures of Conceptual Art, Lawrence Weiner uses language and its potential as art in his work. The wall installations that have been his primary medium since the 1970s consist solely of words in a nondescript lettering painted on walls. The Whitney Museum recently mounted a 40-year retrospective of his work.



Judi Werthein

(Born 1967, Argentina) Lives and works in Brooklyn and Buenos Aires.
Werthein investigates, both aesthetically and critically, the corporatization of culture, and also plays with the trend of arts organizations to devise ever more attractive and unique graphic identities. Werthein came to national prominence with Brinco, a project in which she distributed customized sneakers for free to Mexican immigrants about to attempt an illegal crossing into the United States. She has been selected for solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation; Centro Cultural Borjes, Buenos Aires; Bronx Museum of Art; Centro Cultural San Martin (Buenos Aires), among other venues.



Guido van der Werve

(Born 1977 in The Netherlands) Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Guido van der Werve's work navigates the fine line between visual art and film. His film vignettes — which always feature the artist as protagonist — blend text, music, performance, and narrative in an exploration of the language of cinematography. Van der Werveʼs work was awarded with the René Coelho Award of the Netherlands Media Institute in 2003.



Krzysztof Wodiczko

(Born 1943, Warsaw, Poland) Lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Since 1980, Krzysztof Wodiczko has created more than seventy large-scale slide and video projections of politically charged images on architectural façades and monuments worldwide. Wodiczko heads the Interrogative Design Group and is Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the 1999 Hiroshima Art Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace, and the 2004 College Art Association Award for Distinguished Body of Work.



MEDIA CONTACT: Nicholas Weist, nickw@creativetime.org