Field Station: Ken Grimes is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Steven L. Bridges, Associate Curator. Support for this exhibition is provided by the MSU Federal Credit Union.
About the Exhibition
For more than thirty years, Ken Grimes has diligently maintained a stark palette, creating paintings and works on paper solely in black and white. This, he feels, is the most direct way of contrasting truth and deception. For ultimately this is Grimes’s project: to reveal the truth about the existence of extraterrestrial life and decode the many ways in which life on planet Earth is influenced and shaped by such visitors. Paramount to these efforts are the artist’s visual representations and textual diatribes that delineate how our perceived reality is full of partial truths, and how technology and information can be used to obfuscate our understanding of the world. All of this derives from his 1971 discovery of a glitch in our constructed reality, which initiated a lifelong quest to come to terms with, in his words, the influence of “alien spirituality.”
Field Station
Field Station is an annual cycle of projects that features work by artists at different moments in their careers. With a particular focus on new terrain, the series emphasizes the importance of research by offering a space for artists to develop ideas that may be in the early stages of conception or articulation. Field Station approaches art as a complex language that involves many forms and draws upon different disciplines, from engineering, physics, and agriculture to literature, history, and technology. The notion of a field station specifically points to the importance of experimentation and the idea of the museum as software—a flexible structure that is constantly expanding beyond its walls (the hardware), wherein artists are encouraged to collaborate across disciplines at Michigan State University.
Images
