MMX Open Art Space SHOW V Screening Program: Defenestration curated by Eric Fleischauer
Featuring:
The Jettisoned Yoni Goldstein + Meredith Zielke 2010
Somewhere only we know Jesse McLean 2009
The Fallen Steve Reinke 2006
Black and White Trypps Number Four Ben Russell 2008
</3 Chelsea Welch 2010
Between the Sheets Warren Cockerham 2008
On the Edge of Utterance and Being Articulate: A Brief Introduction to the “Poetics of Space” Todd Simeone 2008
Anne Frank’s chestnut tree (Amsterdam, 2008) Jason Lazarus 2008
Program Description:
The city of Chicago was built on swampland, then destroyed by a devastating fire, and quickly rebuilt atop its own ashes. These imperfect conditions gave rise to a certain spirit that lingers above the city, and initiated a culture of alternative strategies including advancements in engineering and infrastructure that have been adapted and implemented by others around the world – Chicago raised the world’s first skyscraper.
While the eight videos presented here utilize divergent aesthetics and techniques, there is a unifying presence that transcends geography, form, or content. This presence is absence. In a minimal and precise fashion, these artists eschew “the cinematic” and adapt the medium to fit their conceptual frameworks. Various incarnations of lacking and longing motivate, comprise, inspire, and inform the work in this program.
What is contained within the frame is only a trace of what-has-been, but it works to tap into the metaphysical and communicate these larger, complicated, intangible emotions and ideas that are looming outside the frame. It is this direct relationship to their subjects that works to augment the discrete, draw out the ephemeral, and contain the ethereal. By engaging in the impossible task of grasping the intangible, the imminent failure of these videos are transcended by way of sincerity.
Filed under: Somewhere only we know, The Bearing Witness Trilogy
