X Initiative (rooftop) 548 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
Thursday, July 30, 2009, 9:00 pm
Playtime celebrates the sight gag and the visual pun. Engaging the medium, these works employ a purely visual mode of communication, one that depends on comic timing as well as space. The artists look not only to silent comedies for influence, but to the external storytelling of Jacques Tati, the surreal anthropomorphizations of Ernie Kovacks and the tradition of trick photography tracing back to the Lumiere Brothers. Aided by props and animals, the artists appear alone with their cameras, concocting vignettes of wit and expressiveness, without the use of dialogue. Playtime salutes the absurd, the wayward and the out of place. Included in the program are works by Stuart Sherman, VALIE EXPORT, Phyllis Baldino, George Kuchar, John Baldessari, William Wegman, Cynthia Maughan and James Byrne, among others.
Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Avenue, New York City
Thursday, May 24, 2007, 8:00 pm
This was the first program in ALL CIRCUITS ON, a series produced in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives. Exploring both institutions' archives, the series presents rarely-screened works from the early days of video art. The first program looked at early artists' experiments with television. Works in the program examined at how television and video work, presented new ways of critiquing the medium, and proposed new uses for the technology. Viewers learned how video can be used as a tool, for the freeing of information and the creation of a healthy media ecology.