The EAI Collection: Artist Index

Artist Index

 

Anri Sala

Anri Sala, an Albanian artist living in Paris, has gained international attention for his video, animation and photographic works. With an emphasis on slowness, stillness, and intimate detail, Sala explores the interface of documentary and fiction. His painterly works elicit an undercurrent of tension that speaks to political and social realities, articulating loss and alienation through a specificity of place and cultural context that seems rooted in memory and history.

 

John Sanborn

John Sanborn has been a dynamic presence in both video art and commercial television production since 1977. Energetic and kinetic, his music videos, dance pieces and experimental narratives are characterized by high-tech computer editing and post-production.

 

Dan Sandin

As an artist, inventor and educator, Dan Sandin is a pioneering figure in the field of electronic visualization. Sandin, who came to video and computers in the 1970s with a background in physics, was instrumental in the development of imaging devices that could be made accessible to artists for their own duplication and use.

 

Eder Santos

Brazilian videomaker Eder Santos creates vibrant, poetic works that merge the personal, the cultural and the technological to reinterpret motifs that are central to Brazil's African, indigenous and European heritage. Evoking the rhythms and textures of memory and history, he crafts a visual language of high-end and low-end technologies, from digital media to Super-8 film.

 

Jacolby Satterwhite

Jacolby Satterwhite is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses video, performance, 3D animation, drawing, fibers and printmaking to explore themes of memory, desire, and personal and public mythology. In his video works, Satterwhite creates fantastical digital landscapes populated with multiple, costumed avatars of himself, engaging with hand-drawn objects and text as extensions of the body, in a seamless exchange between live performance and constructed worlds. Satterwhite's computer-generated realms—densely layered with proliferating drawings, objects and performances—encompass animated narratives of personal memory and identity.

 

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann, a groundbreaking performance and multidisciplinary artist, has used film and video since the 1960s. Shattering taboos and redefining the notion of the erotic, she confronts sexuality, gender, and the social construction of the female body. Her seminal performances of the 1970s were as transgressive as they were influential. Schneemann continues to provoke, as she explores female sexuality in relation to art-making, ritual, and culture.

 

Bill Seaman

Bill Seaman's associative collages of image, music and language function as audiovisual poems. A composer and poet who writes the electronic music and lyrical text that propel his evocative imagery, Seaman structures his works like musical compositions.

 

Willoughby Sharp

Willoughby Sharp, a founder and publisher of the seminal art magazine Avalanche (1970-76), is an artist, author, curator and teacher. Over the past four decades he has produced films, video sculptures, installations, broadcast works, transmission art, video performances and "Videoviews" (dialogues with contemporary artists), and was a pioneer of pre-Internet satellite art projects.

 

Stuart Sherman

Stuart Sherman's influential art practice defies classification. Celebrated as an avant-garde performer, he also worked in film, video, and other visual arts, in addition to writing plays and poems. Sherman was an iconoclastic builder and manipulator of mass-produced bric-a-brac; he used an intuitive logic to purposefully transform objects into rhetorical questions. He developed these manipulations into an idiosyncratic performance style that was quick-paced and conceptually witty. The culminating tableaux, featuring Sherman and disassembled or repurposed objects, evoke Rene Magritte, Buster Keaton, and Samuel Beckett.

 

Trevor Shimizu

Trevor Shimizu has produced a large body of paintings that are crudely gestural and sparse, and subtle in their compositional aesthetics if not in their subject matter. In works that are semi-autobiographical, humiliating social incidents and aberrations usually kept private are made public. Alongside his painting practice, Shimizu has produced a body of video art that emphasizes how his personal and public identities have been shaped by home video and the banality of television and media consumerism. As a former Technical Director of Electronic Arts Intermix, he developed close friendships and collaborations with artists including Dan Graham, Carolee Schneemann, Shigeko Kubota, and Dara Birnbaum. The influence of other EAI artists, especially the droll, self-depricating humor of Michael Smith, and Mike Kelley’s unflinching portrayals of American culture, is also clearly evident.

 

Eric Siegel

A technical pioneer in video, Eric Siegel had built his own TV set by the age of fourteen. He went on to design and build the Siegel Colorizer in 1968, and a synthesizer in 1970. His early videotapes fused image-processing, synthesis and colorizing with music.

 

Shelly Silver

Interweaving documentary, essay, and fiction, Shelly Silver explores how we negotiate cultural and popular narratives to arrive at definitions of the self. She examines storytelling and role-playing to reveal how identity is both reflected and constructed by television and cinema. As an "outside observer" living in Germany, France, and Japan, she questions the myths and realities of cultural and national identity.

 

Michael Smith

Michael Smith is a video, installation and performance artist who invokes the routines of popular comedy to articulate the banality and hype of mass consumer culture, and the isolation of those whose inner lives are defined by it. Smith chronicles the trivial dreams and adventures of his eponymous alter-ego, the deadpan "Mike," a postmodern Everyman who believes everything and understands nothing in his media-saturated world.

 

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Smithson, who was born in 1938 and died in 1973, was a seminal figure in the art form that became known as earthworks or land art. He radically redefined notions of sculpture through his writings and projects. Among his most important and well-known works are Spiral Jetty (1970), a monumental earthwork located in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, and Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) at Kent State University in Ohio. Smithson's critical writings have had an equally profound impact on contemporary art and theory.

 

Michael Snow

Michael Snow is recognized as one of the most important experimental filmmakers, as well as an accomplished visual artist and musician. His groundbreaking and influential 1967 film Wavelength is a key work in the history of structuralist cinema. In recent years Snow had been working with digital media, exploring electronic processes to further his rigorous investigations into the nature of representation and perception.

 

Squat Theatre

Squat Theatre—whose core members included Stephan Balint, Peter Berg, Eva Buchmuller, Peter Halasz and Anna Koos—was a major presence in the downtown art and theater world of New York, where the group lived and worked from 1977 until 1985. After emigrating from Budapest, Hungary, where their performances were banned, they lived and performed in a storefront on 23rd Street. Squat's radical theater questioned role playing, the act of spectatorship, and the boundaries between art and life, the fictive and the real.

 

Steina

Steina explores transformations of image, space and sound through a dynamic confluence of digital technologies, mechanical devices and natural landscape. After producing pioneering work with Woody Vasulka in the 1970s, Steina focused on the electronic interrelation and manipulation of sound and image. Fusing digital and "real" imagery to create layered spatial and temporal systems, she often uses pre-programmed devices to explore perception and vision.

 

George Stoney

An early advocate of community-based video as a tool for social change, George Stoney was a respected documentary film and video maker, an educator, and a pioneer of public access programs throughout the United States and Canada.

 

Skip Sweeney

Skip Sweeney began experimenting with Moog Vidium visual synthesizers in 1968, producing improvisational, image-processed works before turning to the personal documentary form in the 1980s. In 1970, he was one of the founders of Video Free America, the San Francisco media art center.