The Halsey Institute will present an artist talk and gallery walk-through with exhibiting artist Erwin Redl on Saturday May 21. The event begins with a slide talk at 1pm in the Recital Hall, Simons Center for the Arts, located at 54 St. Philip Street on the College of Charleston campus. We will then walk down the hall to view Redl’s exhibition within the Halsey Institute galleries.

The title of this exhibition is a play on the famous phrase “irrational exuberance” used by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute during the Dot-com bubble of the 1990s. In this case the title is the program. It refers to the artist’s strict methodologies which employ binary logic as well as tropes of minimalism to exuberant extremes. As demonstrated in his light installations and most recent kinetic works, a very restrained vocabulary due to the scale, repetition, and variations leads to a sense of deep corporeality. The meaning oscillates between the purely abstract and profound sensuality.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Austria in 1963, Erwin Redl finished his studies at the Vienna Music Academy with a BA in Composition (1990) and BA in Electronic Music (1991). He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for graduate studies in computer art at the School of Visual Arts, in NYC (MFA 1995). Redl investigates the process of “reverse engineering” by (re-)translating the abstract aesthetic language of virtual reality and 3D computer modeling into architectural environments by means of large-scale light installations.