MediaScope
November 17 and 24, 2003
Dedicated to experimentation with cinematic form and content,
MediaScope presents emerging and recognized artists who discuss
their work with the audience. The program explores filmmaking and
videomaking, as well as Web-based, installation, and digital art
practices.
Organized by Sally
Berger, Assistant Curator; Jytte Jensen, Curator; Laurence Kardish,
Senior Curator; Barbara London, Associate Curator; and Joshua Siegel,
Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media.
Combining the wry and sage voice of a modern-day Mark Twain or an
E. B. White with the vernacular eye of a Walker Evans, Bill Brown
captures history as it is written across the American landscape,
from the cold-war politics of North Dakota’s abandoned nuclear
missile silos in Buffalo Common (2001) and separatist tensions
along the Trans-Canadian Highway in Confederation Park (1999)
to quixotic sightings of extraterrestrial life in Roswell
(1994). Brown will present these incisive film essays as well as
the U.S. premiere of Mountain State (2003), his chronicle
of West Virginia’s checkered past, as told in twenty-five
historical roadside markers. Program 120 min.
Bjørn Melhus recontextualizes images, sound, and narrative
elements of American feature films and television talk shows in
his single-channel videos, films, and installations. The artist
performs all the roles in each work, creating multiple doppelgängers
in an uncanny interpretation of the relationship between fictional
and real-life characters and the construction of identity through
the absorption of mass media. The program includes the U.S. premiere
of his film Auto Center Drive (2003), in which the artist examines
the impact of American feature films on memories and longing; single-channel
videos The Oral Thing (2001) and No Sunshine (1997); and documentation
of his installation works Prime Time (2001) and Again
and Again (1998). Program 120 min.
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