Events
September 30 - October 4: GNY Cinema, Screening with Michael Bell-Smith, John Michael Boling and Javier Morales, Ben Coonley, Tara Mateik, Takeshi Murata, and Paul Slocum
Saturday, October 02, 2010
3:00 PM to 5:00 PM
September 30 - October 4
Michael Bell-Smith, John
Michael Boling and Javier Morales, Ben Coonley, Tara Mateik, Takeshi
Murata, and Paul Slocum
Group show of recent work.
Screened daily at 3pm. Conversation with the artists
following Saturday, October 2 screening.
Michael
Bell-Smith, Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet Synced and
Played Simultaneously, video, 4:22, 2005
Takeshi
Murata, Monster Movie, video, 3:55, 2005
Ben
Coonley, Valentine for Perfect Strangers, video, 3:19, 2006
Paul
Slocum, You’re Not My Father, video, 4:00, 2007
John
Michael Boling and Javier Morales, Body Magic, video, 2:25, 2006
Tara
Mateik, Putting the Balls Away, video, 23:00, 2008
Film
and video artists have worked with appropriated images for decades, but in the
past five years the practice has taken on a new prominence. The emergence of
sites like YouTube and Vimeo, the continued democratization of editing tools,
and the increased access to a vast pool of archival sources have combined to
make the re-editing and re-use of pre-existing material both a prominent
aesthetic strategy and a popular amateur pastime. This program showcases six
significant pieces made since 2005 that engage in various ways with an evolving
media environment. Murata’s Monster Movie pioneered datamoshing,
mimicking the bleeding frames of poorly compressed video, while Coonley’s
chromakeyed sitcom essay Valentine for Perfect Strangers unexpectedly
spread as one of YouTube’s earliest, and most baffling, memes. Slocum’s You’re
Not My Father uses crowd-sourcing to refashion a moment from a 90s TV show
into a Steve Reich style composition, and Bell-Smith’s self-explanatory Chapters
1-12 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously reveals
audio-visual patterns that subtend Kelly’s serial narrative. Originally hosted
on Boling’s website gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com,
Boling and Morales’ frenetically infectious Body Magic typifies the
playful spirit of a new generation of internet artists for whom the web is
another part of pop culture. Documenting Mateik’s restaging of Billie Jean
King’s 1973 defeat of Bobby Riggs in the infamous “Battle of the Sexes” tennis
match, Putting the Balls Away reinterprets the feminist struggle of
another era in light of a new transgender consciousness. Exhibiting a range of
formal techniques and conceptual maneuvers, these six videos show how
appropriation now speaks not only to the original source materials, but the
larger circulation and dispersion of culture through emergent technologies.
