Long Island University's Brooklyn campus announces with great pleasure the opening of its fall exhibition season with Skull Theater, a new installation by Lisa Hein and Bob Seng.  The exhibition opens on Wednesday, September 3 with a reception from 6 to 8, and runs daily through September 30.  Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9-6 and weekends from 10-5.  Admission is free.

As artists specializing in site generated projects, Hein and Seng are inspired by two features of the Humanites Gallery's surroundings. The first is its location in a theater lobby.  The second is its peculiar walls:  all glass, and curved into a shape like a head on the floor.

Taking content from these surroundings, Hein and Seng bring lights and drapes (like those in neighboring Kumble Theater) inside the gallery space.  Theater curtains swerve and bloom into brain-like convolutions.  The convolutions pile into clouds, developing interior weather of their own.  As academic life resumes, Skull Theater compares solitary and social modes of artistic development.  If the Romantic model features individual angst in studio, the more recent collective model frequently offers social experience itself as the product.

Lisa Hein and Bob Seng have collaborated on more than 25 site projects since 1996.  They may be best known in New York for Jello Brick Wall, cooked and mortared over several months at Exit Art in 2003.  Other projects include Dust Bustier, a wind activated storefront installation, at Dust, Las Vegas;  Whoopie Kiosk, a sprinkler installation at Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburgh;  and Whopper, a wandering, spouting whale effigy, in New York harbor off the Brooklyn waterfront.  Hein and Seng's upcoming projects include a new installation at 1305 Position, Austin, TX in October.

This exhibition is made possible in part by Materials for the Arts, NYC  Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.