Carnegie Museum hosts 9 local artists for Biennial

The Pittsburgh Biennial

Carnegie Museum of… The Pittsburgh Biennial

Carnegie Museum of Art

Heinz Galleries

June 17 through September 18

In Carnegie Museum’s Biennial exhibition, the sound of a baby crying is part of the art this time..

This year the Carnegie will join four other locations, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Miller Gallery, Pittsburgh Filmmakers and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the event’s original developer, to take part in the Pittsburgh Biennial. which showcases local artists.

The nine artists whose work will appear in the Carnegie will feature different mediums, but each created art focused on the concepts of work and labor, a theme developed by Dan Byers, the associate curator at the Oakland museum and the exhibition’s organizer.

Conceptual artist Lenka Clayton, who Carnegie will feature, was unsure whether she would be able to be a part of the Biennial because she was pregnant with her son Otto, who was born in April, during most of the exhibit’s planning stages.

“There is very little support for freelance artists who have children. It was a very big step for me to imagine having a child,” she said.

Originally from England, Clayton would there have received a monthly maternity-leave stipend from the British government because her career as a freelance artist does not include certain benefits. Ellen James, a spokeswoman for the Carnegie Museum of Art, said that no such stipend exists in the U.S.. So the Carnegie Museum has agreed to pay the equivalent of England’s maternity leave benefit for her artwork as an honorarium.

“It’s a question about the value of motherhood, the value of of artists in society,” James said.

Because of her pregnancy, Clayton found her own way of interpreting the Carnegie exhibition’s theme of work and labor. The result is her piece “Maternity Leave.”

Instead of forgoing the opportunity to take part in the Biennial, Clayton decided that her artwork for the exhibition would evolve from her absence. In her allotted portion of the exhibit space, there will be a white baby monitor sending a live feed from her home, capturing Clayton and her son’s private life.

“I’m interested in putting together two very separate worlds,” Clayton said referring to the public and the private.

Clayton compares the experience of visiting her piece to “listening to a radio.” The audience will understand that what they hear is actually happening, although they will not see it.

James hopes that the Biennial gets people to notice local artists like Clayton, who moved to Lawrenceville in 2009, as well as artists who have roots in or connections to Pittsburgh.

“We hope the Pittsburgh Biennial can help elevate the status of local artists to a global setting,” she said.

The exhibition’s other eight artists are Peggy Ahwesh, Stephanie Beroes, Brandon Boan, Ed Eberle, Fabrizio Gerbino, Jamie Gruzska, Zak Prekop and Frank Santoro. The mediums the group uses range from paint to video to Clayton’s monitor. James said the exhibit’s theme relates to the actual way the artists work and labor over their pieces, and she feels this display demonstrates the variety of mediums Pittsburgh artists use.

While Clayton’s art is about hearing and not seeing, photographer Jamie Gruzska’s contribution is more visually oriented. The administrator of the photography program at Carnegie Mellon will present 27 black-and-white photographs he produced in a dark room.

The photographs — some of which are from Gruzska’s adolescence — came from various sets of negatives he’s taken over the years. In order to follow the original process of the old photographs, Gruzska chose to develop them chemically rather than digitally.

“Because the negatives were made in a particular way, I feel like I have a certain allegiance [to them],” Gruzska said.

The collection is a way for the photographer to recreate his past in images. He began working with photography when he was 11, and since he chose many of the photographs for the exhibition from his adolescence, the collection is helping him to reassess who he was when they were taken.

Gruzska has interspersed current photographs throughout the exhibit as well, which he also developed chemically. Each photograph will have a label referencing the time Gruzska took and then developed it, so that the audience can differentiate between the two time periods.

“There’s sort of a spanning of time. It’s exploring the idea of memory,” he said.

The process of resurrecting these photos and producing them is how the photographer chose to incorporate the exhibition’s themes.

“The process is trying to work with that memory. The labor is that — a way of making that time alive again for me and for the viewer. That’s what all the work’s for,” Gruzska said.

Gruzska also said he is proud to be a part of the Pittsburgh Biennial because of the sense of community it evokes for both the artist and the audience.

“Whether it’s conscious or not, I think there is a connection between the artist and the audience in the city,” he said.