AMELIA BAUER
Press
Hey,
that's my photo!
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
October 1, 2008
"Last
Friday night — before rushing home to watch the first Presidential
Debate — your friends at Dossier attended the opening of Amelia
Bauer’s Environs exhibition at Capricious Space in Brooklyn.
Capricious Space is a relatively new, invitingly cozy addition to Williamsburg’s
art scene and was a fitting venue for Bauer’s refined collection
of drawings, sculptures and photographs. The exhibition was immediately
captivating for its intricacies..."
full story here
Dossier
Journal
September 30, 2008
"Hugely entertaining and deadpan smart, Evany Thomas's The Secret Language of Sleep (McSweeney's) details 39 positions for dormant lovers, from Melting Spoons (that's Classic Spooning for codependents) to Starfish and Conch ('the preferred position for couples who fight well together') and Sixth Posture of the Perfumed Forest (on hand on stomach, opposite elbow across eyes). Amelia Bauer's line drawings, evocative of prim 1950s sex guides, give this tiny volume its tart appeal."
O
Magazine
December 2006
"[Tobias
Wong] and artist Amelia Bauer created a chandelier for Swarovski, called
the Iceberg Chandelier, that was released during the Art Basel Miami
Beach fair last December. Consisting of an aquarium filled with crystals
and piranhas (acquired on the black market because the fish are illegal
in Florida), it was a biting comment on the fair itself."
The
Walrus
October, 2006
“In
something of a conceptual tangent to its recent Landminds exhibition,
[…] the Center for Contemporary Arts now antes up for Santa Fe’s
biggest art week with Scenic Overlook. Like Landminds, the work is
largely about geographies and place, albeit frequently in less obvious
ways. Actual roadside scenic overlooks are all about mitigated views
and arbitrary attachments to beauty or significance, so the parallels
to the artist’s process and the art object are fairly straightforward,
but this group distillation of interpretations and riffs that depart
from that basic point create a delightfully dissonant collection of
place and perspective-based manipulations.
The most ready adaptation is found in Amelia Bauer and Robert de St.
Phalle’s sculptural effort, ‘Manifest Destiny.’ The
piece is literally and overlook, a 4x8 sheet of terraformed expanse hovering
around 18 inches off the ground. The sheet’s topography creates
a bland, creamy mesa with deep canyons on two sides, while a model tract
housing development perches in the center, its streets laid out in the
echo of documented crop circles. Bauer and St. Phalle’s work offers
a dramatic, bird’s eye sense of how our short-term concerns – lawns,
swimming pools, two car garages and whether or not cul-de-sacs have enough
room for a fire truck to make a u-turn –
imprint and pattern the planet with a logic at least as inscrutable as
anything we might ascribe to aliens. Further consideration brings up
issues of economics and architecture, in particular the disjointed housing
hubris that comes with a modicum of luxury. Why is the American dream
home something that must simultaneously hide from and ignore the elements,
while attempting to dominate the land? I’ve never really thought
of home construction as passive aggressive before, but looking down at ‘Manifest
Destiny,’ its clear as day.”
The Santa Fe Reporter
July 5, 2006
The
Secret Language of Sleep was featured on Good Morning America. View
the full story here.
ABC's
Good Morning America
Sunday, April 23, 2006
"One of the side-effects of the 'information explosion' that has swamped our brains and hard drives over the past 20 years has been a weakening of the position of the expert and an empowerment of the ordinary person. Help Your Self, a new exhibit at the Helen Pitt artist-run centre, brings a humorous, but not condescending, look at this phenomenon. Seven artists -- and a collective -- are represented here: Amelia Bauer, Robert de Saint Phalle, Matt Gerring, Laura Madera, Sandra Meigs, Mariah Robertson, Tobias Wong, and the 536 Collective. Meigs and Madera are both painters: their works offer the most in terms of a traditional art form that is responsive to the psyche of the artist... Amelia Bauer's works veer more closely to that fear of affirmation, in particular her hand mirror in the shape of a 'thumbs-up.' That positive gesture, accompanied so often by the wink and the tongue-click, seems to be empty of meaning -- or, rather, thumbs-up signifies false affirmation, the pretense of support. This, then, is perhaps the target of Bauer's little sculpture: the lies that hide behind such gestures."
The Vancouver Sun
February 6, 2006
"Where better to unveil Swarovski's latest Crystal Palace chandeliers than at the Paris Theater in South Beach? Sparkling throughout the Art Deco building were dozens of dazzling extravagances, from a semi-virtual, laser-and-crystal display by the lighting designer Paul Cocksedge to a submersible optical installation by the architect Michael Gabellini. But the showstopper came from Tobias Wong and Amelia Bauer: two dozen piranhas swimming beneath 'icebergs' made of Swarovski crystal. 'Miami inspired us to do an aquarium,' Wong explains, 'where the piranhas can be seen guarding the crystals.' The art world, after all, is full of sharks."
V Man
Spring/Summer 2006
"Sure the sex in your relationship is pretty awesome (except sometimes after too many vodkas -- so furious and then nothing -- but that's no one's fault), and your mom seems to like your mate, but according to writer Evany Thomas, the real indication of the future of your love life is dictated by the way you and your hunny snuggle. ... Thanks to Thomas's cool dissection of shared sleep strategies and Amelia Bauer's clinical illustrations, you can finally ask with authority, 'What happened? Why ... don't you Springloader me anymore?'"
V Magazine
Spring 2006
SHOWstudio
2006
"The piranhas were only on loan and would have to go back to wherever
lethal predators stay between gigs. For the time being, though, they were in
the lobby of the newly renovated Paris Theater here, two dozen deadly fish
enclosed in Tobias Wong's and Amelia Bauer's tropical aquarium-cum-chandelier-cum-artwork
made from jagged strands of Swarovski crystal, dangling above $12,000 worth
of jet crystal 'gravel' and anomalously titled 'Iceberg.' The fish were tinier
than one might expect, more delicate and lividly beautiful in their darting
efficiency. They were also, it must be said, almost too easy a metaphor for
the event that inspired their presence, the annual art and design fair and
aesthetic feeding frenzy known as Art Basel Miami Beach. 'We considered using
baby sharks,' said Mr. Wong, one of a group of renowned designers commissioned
by the crystal company to make chandeliers that were unveiled during the fair.
'But for Art Basel we really wanted something that traveled in schools."
The New York Times
December 8, 2005
"Airport Gift Shop is Wong's duty-free storefront inside the defunct TWA terminal at JFK International Airport. Christened with deliberate flatness, the fully functioning boutique is Wong's contribution to, a multimedia installation that will take up residence in the iconic, Eero Saarinen–designed terminal of the same name starting October 1. Sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and curated by artist Rachel K. Ward, the aviation-themed exhibit will be on display through January 2005, recalling air travel's 1960s heyday and reflecting on its current fraught state... For posterity, NYC-based art collaborative Line Up contributes one of Airport Gift Shop's most compelling offerings: an old-fashioned photo booth that snaps pictures surveillance-camera style (a strip of four photos is $2). The booth will serve to remind you why you suffered through those security lines in the first place: to visit the people you love—and, of course, to bring them stuff."
Time Out New York
September 9-16, 2004