Between You and Me

SculptureCenter is proud to present Between You and Me, an exhibition of single-channel video works. The exhibition will be on view September 12 - November 29, 2004 with an opening reception on Sunday September 19 from 2-5 pm.

Between You and Me makes viewers into witnesses of short video soliloquies in the intimate privacy of isolated viewing areas. Varying from secret, silent moments, confessional meditations, to spoken monologues, the selected videos each address their onlookers directly, asking for a personal audience of only one at a time.

The exhibition is installed on pre-existing concrete shelves in one of the museum's lower-level galleries, in a long corridor space measuring only three feet wide. The physical exhibition space prohibits viewers from moving farther than three feet away from the monitors, a forced proximity that amplifies the intimate nature of the works and our relationship to them. Between You and Me distances itself from interactive impulses and unfolding cinematic storylines, presenting monologues rather than dialogues.

The exhibition features the work of seven emerging artists. In short super-8 film vignettes, New York-based artist Shannon Plumb proposes a voyeuristic look into secret moments when she tries on different personality guises, pretending to be watching a horror film or riding a roller coaster.

Tom Johnson, also based in New York, offers a more vocal kind of intimacy: seated in front of his camera, he delivers rambling meditations that begin as complex philosophical queries, only to become absurd abstractions of thought, with the artist caught in the maze of his own mind. His monologues ambiguously hover between heartfelt sincerity and jumbled mania.

Montreal-based artist Christof Migone creates video, performance, sound, and radio works. Included here is his video diptych, Poker (2001), showing a pair of hands awkwardly poking, caressing, or prodding a face, "playing" it like an unfamiliar yet intimate instrument, breaching the borders that separate bodies on a search for sounds they might make.

Portland artist Harrell Fletcher's quiet video portraits are celebrations of small beauties, isolated in short moments of restrained appreciation. Included in this exhibition is Babies (NYC) (2004), a series of close-ups of babies in strollers, as well as Hello There Friend (Queens, NY) (2004), a video flip-book of hand-held discarded objects found on city streets.

Los Angeles-based artist Kerry Tribe presents Untitled (Potential Terrorist) (2002), which shows Warhol-esque headshots of 29 consecutive actors responding to a casting call for a potential terrorist in a series of screen tests.

Marit Følstad's Bubbles (2003) exposes the successes and failures of the body. Blowing bubble after bubble of bubblegum, the artist fills the frame with gum, only to have the moment shatter, over and over, and become a blank stare.

Finally, Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock's new video Phantom/Fountain (2004) combines an endurance-based performance with a disquieting closeness to death: the piece shows the artist spitting morgue water at the camera. Picking up where Bruce Nauman's Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966) left off and following its art historical concerns and references, Apicella-Hitchcock creates a formal abstraction of shape, trajectory, and framing that also accentuates a psychological discomfort with a physical proximity to death.

Pressetext

Between You and Me - single-channel video works
Kurator: Anthony Huberman

mit Stephan Apicella, Harrell Fletcher, Marit Folstad, Tom Johnson, Christof Migone, Shannon Plumb, Kerry Tribe

Stationen:
12.09.04 - 29.11.04 SculptureCenter, Long Island City
12.03.05 - 17.04.05 Arthouse Texas, Austin