A 48 hour video exhibition
May 1 – May 3, 2020
5pm-5pm
Remember when we were so busy we had to tape a banana to the wall and call it art? Brisk and efficient cultural consumption–I mean really, what were we thinking?–was always dubious at best. From the vantage point of New York City in lockdown at the epicenter of a global pandemic, many of us strangely find ourselves with time to burn. Why open a can when you can soak beans for 14 hours? Why do anything at all today, when you can do it tomorrow? Of course, to be in this situation is to be among the lucky who are even able to hunker, locked in battle with our stupid refrigerators, our stupid cohabitants, and our stupid bills.
Together with the grinding specificity of the minute to minute (how long has it been since I last washed my hands???) all of us endure a new blindness to the expansive future: who among us knows what June will look like, or whether we will be here to see it? In this moment of forging new relationships to time, we are inspired to present TIME LAPSE, a 48-hour exhibition of streaming video art to soothe, irritate, and entertain you in your anxious confinement. We are sorry we can’t provide our usual vintage of “gallery white,” but we also know that whatever you BYO of will be superior. What we will provide is an amazing array of video art in its original format that can replace your news feed on the screen of your choice. We recommend letting it play the whole time, allowing your attention to drift and to refocus, just as it did when the “old you” was out in the world where new stimulus was constant, unexpected, and compelling.
| Artist | Title | runtime |
|---|---|---|
| Program repeats, in this order | Starting at 5pm May 1st | |
| Valery Jung Estabrook | Beautiful Face, 2017 | 09:35 |
| David Opdyke | Clean Slate, 2018 | 03:15 |
| LoVid | Wetland Americana, 2018 | 11:37 |
| Chanan Ben Simon and Inkyoung Bae | Last Chance, 2019 | 02:08 |
| Sarada Rauch | Untethered Astronaut, 2020 | 24:59 |
| Mitch Patrick | Slipstream, 2020 | 02:07 |
| Adam Douglas Thompson | Pan, 2014 | 12:33 |
| Jennifer Dalton | New Trick, 2016 | 05:30 |
| Sal Muñoz | How To Serve Yourself, 2017 | 03:41 |
| Marie Guex | A Hum in the Room, 2016 | 04:48 |
| Rachel Rampleman | LACTIC Incorporated; Times Square Shoot (Documentary), 2016 | 30:09 |
| Faith Holland | Hello Barbie, 2019 | 08:21 |
| Vanessa Albury | Length of Reel Length of Road, 2010 | 03:36 |
| Sarada Rauch | this is what it feels like in the end, 2018 | 01:44 |
| Jennifer and Kevin McCoy | Broker, 2016 | 28:07 |
| Adam Douglas Thompson | Fall, 2017 | 03:06 |
| LoVid | Infinitely Unresolved, 2019 | 06:49 |
| Azikiwe Mohammed | New Davonhaime Department of Tourism Commercial, 2017 | 01:37 |
| Chanan Ben Simon and Inkyoung Bae | Hey Siri in Quarantine, 2020 | 07:54 |
| David Opdyke | I’ll be Waiting on the Other Side, 2017 | 02:59 |
| Jennifer and Kevin McCoy | Cleaner, 2018 | 27:14 |
| Mitch Patrick | Hammer Human, 2019 | 02:07 |
| Anthony Discenza | Charlton Heston: The Future has Already been Written, 2009 | 96:00 |
Vanessa Albury, “Length of Reel Length of Road” 2010 :
“Length of Reel, Length of Road” is a Super 8 film from my series Untitled (Camera, Body, Nature Exercises) created by experimenting with nature, perception, my body and my camera from 2007 to 2009. The length of a reel of film determines the duration of each piece. In “Length of Reel, Length of Road,” I consider how driving a car down a road is a cinematic experience. Wanting to see how far the length of a film reel would take me down a road in Nashville, my hometown, while driving. I begin filming as I turn onto a street and the reel ends as I reach the end of the same street.
Inkyoung Bae and Chanan Ben Simon , “Last Chance” 2019 and “Hey Siri in Quarantine” 2020 :
“Last Chance” is a morning workout video for the last days on earth and “Hey Siri in Quarantine” is a conversation between a human and an AI entity who are longing to switch roles.
Jennifer Dalton, “New Trick” 2016 :
“New Trick” chronicles my attempt over the course of one year to learn to execute a standing backflip, addressing serious themes of aging, risk and ambition, and the less serious theme of looking like an idiot.
Anthony Discenza, “Charlton Heston: The Future Has Already Been Written,” 2009 :
One of the last big video works I made, “Charlton Heston: The Future has Already Been Written” was a deranged mashup of three classic late ’60s / early ’70s dystopian films: Soylent Green, Omega Man, and Planet of the Apes. The work alternates all three films in their entirety every 10th of a second, merging the films’ separate narratives into an aggressively hypnagogic fugue dominated by the saturnine features, bare chest, and flashing teeth of the former head of the NRA. All three films had been enormously influential on me as a child, and had always been linked to each other in my mind not only because of the presence of Heston, but because of their dystopian premise, early ’70s aesthetic, and generally pessimistic vibe. As a formal experiment, the work was an attempt to see how I might try to get separate films to occupy the same space at the same time, but it was also an acknowledgment and distillation of the influence the films had for me–as well as a kind of meditation on Heston himself: in each movie, Heston plays a protagonist who has become alienated from the world around him, and who is destroyed at the end of each film by a revelation about the nature of that world. This story arc seemed strangely fitting for Heston, a man who started out as a progressive civil rights activist and ended his life as an arch-conservative suffering from a neurodegenerative illness.
Valery Jung Estabrook, “Beautiful Face” 2017 :
In mid-2016 I started creating hand painted masks that investigate the desire to change the physical self for the purpose of self-liberation. This video “Beautiful Face” is a combination of found and original footage that explores the themes of cultural appropriation, racial stereotypes and gender roles through the performative use of these masks.
Marie Guex , “A Hum in the Room” 2016 :
“A Hum in the Room” is composed of 240 photographs conveying the concept of motion as a succession of immobilities. The movement is decomposed into frames laid out on the canvas, while also performing as motion, the way a movies does. As the viewer shifts his gaze from representation to abstraction, a new layer emerges, revealing an overall image full of rhythm and musicality.
Faith Holland, “Hello Barbie” 2018 :
“Hello Barbie” tests the limits of Mattel’s first AI Barbie that was launched as part of a growing trend of AI toys in 2015. In this video, her promises are tested against her realities and I point towards the ways in which she is just like any other Barbie doll, regardless of her hardware update.
LoVid, “Wetland Americana” 2018 “Infinitely Unresolved” 2019 :
Filmed in wetlands of Long Island (NY/USA) and Cerritos Beach in Baja California Sur (Mexico) “Wetland Americana” flickers between abstraction and depictions of raging water. LoVid mixes materials from their analog A/V synthesizer with footage shot using an underwater camera. This immersive work is driven by the increasingly blurred borders of water and land in a time of geopolitical identity and environmental crises.
“Infinitely Unresolved” is a collaboration with performance artist and dancer Arien Wilkerson (TNMOT AZTRO). LoVid and Wilkerson exchanged short dance sequences and DM’s that were edited into a dance on desktop collage composition. The video was filmed entirely using Facebook/Instagram Live; selfie reflections, dirty screens, social media emotions, gender, and race representation, are all scrambled by pushing the live “analog video” effects and filters of these social media interfaces to a breaking point.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, “Broker” 2016 and “Cleaner” 2019 :
Shot on the seventy-seventh floor apartment of one of New York City’s many Trump Towers, “Broker” is a meticulously shot portrayal of a high end real estate broker, seen here as the physical embodiment of the constantly accelerating pitch of luxury merchandising. The film uses the architecture of the apartment to create an echo chamber of life style messages.
“Cleaner” traces the creative awakening of a maintenance worker. Her movements are framed within the routines of manual labor yet set against the work environment of the tech economy. The film, shot on location at the headquarters of Kickstarter, juxtaposes the physicality of traditional labor with the abstraction of technological work through its use of soaring camera work, precise framing, and choreography inspired by every day movement. This fractured narrative exposes the tight grip of corporate social space and the precarity inherent in all forms of work today.
Azikiwe Mohammed, “ New Davonhaime Department of Tourism Commercial” 2017 :
There is a town called New Davonhaime. It has many businesses, one of which is a thrift store called Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime. Jimmy’s travels. When Jimmy’s traveled to the Ace Hotel in Chicago I made this. This is a DOT (Department of Tourism) commercial I made for that place.
Sal Muñoz, “How to Serve Yourself” 2017 :
“How to Serve Yourself” is a tongue-in-cheek instructional video satirizing machismo and patriarchy in Xicanx & Latinx communities.
David Opdyke, “Clean Slate” 2018 and “I’ll be Waiting on the Other Side” 2017 :
In “Clean Slate,” a peaceful sky is under threat from new arrivals who will stop at nothing and want everything. When all seems lost, a band of survivors changes the rules and attempts a daring escape. Are they willing to do what is necessary to win their freedom? In “I’ll be Waiting on the Other Side,” a quiet community responds to an unknown threat from outside. Drastic measures split neighbor from neighbor. Was all the damage worth it?
Mitch Patrick, “Slipstream Protein Walker” 2020 and “Hammer Human” 2019 :
“Slipstream Protein Walker” is a one minute ode to time and biological circumstance. A fuse burns, celebrating a quote from Delmore Schwart’s poem “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”. “Hammer Human” is a one minute ode to a suffering ecology. Bubbles marking fragilities and human histories embedded into stone.
Rachel Rampleman, “LACTIC Incorporated; Times Square Shoot (Documentary)” 2016 :
LACTIC Incorporated is an avant-garde clothing brand that takes the detritus of corporate life and reinterprets it into one-of-a-kind structural garments that challenge the polarization of gender and critiques existing power structures. This video produced in the summer of 2016 is my documentation of the shoot in Times Square for their —AUTO—MATIC Collection photo and video lookbooks.
Sarada Rauch, “this is what it feels like in the end” 2018 and “Untethered Astronaut” 2020 :
“this is what it feels like in the end” explores the residue after the demise of the human species. In it, a digital fire sweeps smoothly across mountains in the background in the shape of the waveform of the song, the fire’s progress tracing that of the song. “Untethered Astronaut” investigates systems of power such as whiteness, male-dominance and class privilege. Using herself as subject matter, the artist reenacts her research, memory and personal experience during her time in Cape Town, South Africa; Heraklion, Crete; and her childhood in East Los Angeles.
Adam Thompson, “Pan” 2014 and “Fall” 2017 :
In “Pan,” we move across a seemingly never-ending landscape. The scenes suffuse banal, suburban imagery with elements of surreality and disturbing narrative. A dog jumps to catch a UFO, a man shoves his head in a mailbox, and Noah’s ark makes landfall in a Midwestern city. The scenery is mostly static, but small movements create a strange sense of time, as if we are caught in a single quivering tick of the the clock. “Fall” is a meditation on autumnal foreboding. It was begun just prior to the 2016 Presidential election, put aside for many months, and was completed in the fall of 2017. A variety of surreal tableaus unfold, implying the presence of malevolent forces. A trash bag writhes, fallen leaves play chess, and a babysitter (with a lamp for a head) fails to guard the house. Trump hovers around the edges, but whether he is cause or consequence of these hauntings is an open question.