SCREEN
Organized by Irena Popiashvili
26 July – 8 September, 2001

Exhibition

Opening Party July 26 8pm - midnight

Videos:

Fabio Kacero Untitled, 2001, 2 hours
Kacero's Untitled presents a compilation of all the people the artist has known during his life as the credits of a film. This work functions as the ending of a nonexistent film whose content is impossible to describe. Real people from the artist's life are actors whose presence is reduced to their names. The credits convey both the impossibility of making such a film and the fictional nature of what we call life.

Ellen Harvey I am a Bad Camera, 2001, 30 min.
I am a Bad Camera is a video projection of a portrait drawing by the artist of a member of the opposite sex. The video starts with a view of the blank paper on which the drawing then gradually takes shape. The drawing takes 30 minutes to complete. Neither the artist nor the subject are ever visible. The audio consists of the subject's answer to the question Do you think the drawing looks like you?

Amy O’Neill NYC Music Videos, 2000, 11 minutes
These five NYC Music Videos document sites where music is being played or performed, and each one is titled after the name of the place it was shot: Chubby's Deli, A Train, Staten Island Ferry, Brooklyn Loft, and Montero's Bar. While the footage was being shot with a VHS camera and a spy eye, the found sound was recorded being played on a radio, a stereo, a jukebox, or musical instruments. Unsuspecting people make up the background to sounds which command the interpretations of their movements.

Alexander Roytburd Exercises for Two Bodies and a Monument, 1999, 10 minutes
This piece is part of a 3-screen projection and performance, titled Balkan Ritual Music of 1999, that was presented at the opening of the Future is Now exhibition in Maribor, Slovenia in August of 1999. In it, Roytburd portrays the Balkan conflict in a politically charged yet comical sketch evocative of the silent-film era. He made it right after Psychedelic Inversion of the Battleship Potemkin into Sergei Eisenstein's Tautological Hallucination, 1998, which is on view at this year's Venice Biennale.

Zachary Shuman Bifurcation, 2001, 3:30 minutes
Zachary Shuman's videos investigate the impact of technology and architecture on various symbiotic human communities. Through his exploration of animation and video processing, he examines the causal elements of both of these powerful forces on the human mind and body. Additionally, he explores new ways to communicate what he intuits as hidden flows and waves of radiation that result from the complexity of the accumulation of modern-day communication and construction. Recently, he has collaborated with architect Bernard Tschumi and artist Paul D. Miller to create a video piece for the Venice Biennale.

Ann Sofi Sidén Head Lake Piss Down, 2000, 7 minutes
The video is based on an installment of this acclaimed video/sculptor’s self-portrait as an urinating female. In the video this figurative sculpture is transported to Wanås, Sweden and installed in an aristocratic park by several workers. As the artist watches on, the male workers handle her image touching and adjusting her double in its proper crouching perch. The action borders ambiguously between comfort and discomfort. That is what happens to the audience with the finished piece, which is simultaneously inviting and disconcerting, making the audience both viewer and voyeur.

Chris Sollars World Cup, 1998, 6 min
This video is part of an ongoing body of work based on football that examines the physical skill, intuition, and split-second decisions demanded by the sport. Sollars works from the premise that wherever there is a ball, a field can be created. The game creates a set of actions in which players and viewers all become participants; everyone becomes involved. The objectives are always the same, but each time the game is played the results are different. World Cup is inspired by thinking about how to encourage Americans to watch soccer.

Photographs by:

Andrea Frank
Andrea Frank's series of large color photographs investigates the Colonia Novarese, a modernist building on the waterfront near Rimini, Italy, which was built in 1934 as a fascist youth camp used for the ideological indoctrination of children. The romantic beauty of the images opens itself to other layers of meaning: images of decay quickly become metaphors for the fascist ideology that informed the construction of this building, tainting the modernist architecture and its fascinating interiors. What emerges is a symbolic clash between two very different and opposed utopian ideologies: fascism and rationalism.

Susa Templin
In her photographs, Susa Templin looks for the empty spaces in heavily urbanized areas. In Manhattan, she finds empty swimming pools that resemble blank screens in the landscape and shoots them from a bird's-eye point of view.

Mark Woods
Mark Woods's still-life photographs of clean monochrome used mattresses displaced from their bedroom context function as allegories of recording; as video's unconscious, as it were. They look very much like paused, blank television and projection screens and could even serve as projection surfaces, but they also literally document the temporarily vacated space where sex, conception, birth, sleep, dreams, and death all usually occur. Woods's actual-size photograph of the mattress he sleeps on is the culmination of this series, at once a record of his body and its effacement: a portrait of the artist as a screen.

Artist Bio

Organized by Irena Popiashvili

Participating artists:
Fabio Kacero, Ellen Harvey, Amy O'Neill, Alexander Roytburd, Zachary Schuman, Ann Sofi Sidén, Chris Sollars; Andrea Frank, Susa Templin, Mark Woods