Age of Entanglement marks the second exhibition of Naomie Kremer’s work at the ICA. In 2005, we presented Keeping Time: Naomie Kremer Works 1992-2004, a mid-career survey of the artist’s large-scale paintings. The current show affords the ICA the rare opportunity to present the next chapter in the artist’s oeuvre and provides visitors with the chance to see the evolution of the artist’s career from one decade to the next. During that time, Kremer has built on her previous endeavors to create an entirely new body of work.

Age of Entanglement cuts across a variety of disciplines: painting, photography, digital image processing and high-resolution projection. Kremer’s intent is to immerse visitors in a heightened reality by using video footage from the real world and manipulating it until an imaginary world emerges.

 

A consistent underlying principle in Kremer’s work has been a disruption of the painted surface. In 2000, she began experimenting with video in order to explore the element of time in her work. She started by animating some texts she had written, and continued with animating a number of her finished paintings. In 2008, following a commission by the Berkeley Opera to create a video set design for Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, she started to explore projecting video onto her paintings. By layering the canvases with moving images, she has been able to incorporate a time component in an immediate way. As she explains, “Video structures the viewer’s time in a way painting can’t. Marrying the two media creates a “hybrid” – a mysterious object in which the content moves and glows, leaving the viewer uncertain which part is paint and which projection, till the spot where the gaze is resting starts to move.”

 

The exhibition title refers to the blending of disparate elements, which are perceived simultaneously in Kremer’s work. Whether it is the hybrid canvases that combine painting and video, or the text-based pieces that combine video and music, or the video works that incorporate multiple perspectives, there are numerous elements working together in each piece. In the world of physics, “entanglement,” in its most elementary form, refers to the theory that two opposite things can affect each other. While it is not necessary to dive too deeply into the fine aspects of this complex theory that Albert Einstein skeptically deemed “spooky action at a distance,” the humanistic notion of entanglement and connectivity apply most appropriately to Kremer’s new body of work.

Kremer was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and currently lives and works in the Bay Area. She earned her MFA from California College of the Arts, and an MA in Art History from Sussex University in Brighton, England. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts.

Naomie Kremer: Age of Entanglement is generously supported in part by Alan and Doris Burgess.