George Kuchar

EAI is pleased to partner with the Museum of the City of New York to co-present Home Video: Media Art in Response to HIV/AIDS, a screening and discussion of video work exploring the intersections of art, caretaking, and home. The program will run in conjunction with the exhibition AIDS at Home, now on view at MCNY. George Kuchar’s The Thursday People, a portrait of filmmaker Curt McDowell and those who loved him, will be screened along with a video portrait of artist Martin Wong by Charlie Ahearn and We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by collective WAVE (Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise).

Charlie Ahearn, WAVE members Alexandra Juhasz and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, and EAI's Karl McCool will appear for a discussion, moderated by AIDS at Home curator Stephen Vider.

EAI presented a seasonally themed free screening of macabre media digging through the tropes of horror cinema. Although narrative, genre, and lurid popular entertainment may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for artists' media, the grotesque—and specifically its situation within the televisual dimension—has crept into approaches as varied as the diary video, direct-camera performance, film/video hybrid, and datamosh.

By dissecting and reanimating the themes and situations of horror film and television, artists such as Peggy Ahwesh, Michael Smith, Cynthia Maughan, Cecilia Condit, Tony Oursler, and George Kuchar offer a subversive post-mortem on the syntax and politics of the genre while offering a glimpse of the unknown, mysterious, and shocking that lurk at the video signal's outer limits.

EAI presented Warp Drives, a special summer screening of videos driven by science fiction's far-out forms of matter and energy. In videos that ranged from dark stories of doomsday and destruction to speculative meditations on technological evolution and alienation, artists Peggy Ahwesh, Joan Jonas, George Kuchar, Tony Oursler, and Ryan Trecartin confronted the viewer with visions of individuals disconnected from the present or inhabiting alien psychological states.

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.