MediaScope 2005
February 7–December 12, 2005

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.

MediaScope is supported by Jennifer McSweeney.

Donigan Cumming (Montreal)
Cumming uses video, photography, and mixed-media installation to challenge conventions of representation. Society’s outcasts have been the artist’s principal theme since his 1986 photographic cycle Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography. In 1993, Cumming began recording roughly rehearsed videos with many of the same subjects—the aging, ill, and socially assisted poor—in their intimate surroundings. These darkly comedic tales can be likened to Artaud’s theater of the absurd and contemporary British artist Richard Billingham’s video and photographic family portraits. Premiering are some of Cummings’s recent videos, including Locke’s Way (2003) and Cold Harbor (2003), shown with documentation of his latest work with encaustic collage. Program 95 min.
Monday, February 7, 8:00. T2

Christian Jankowski (Berlin)
Jankowski is a German artist whose clever film and video installations explore language, social exchange, and the magical properties of art. This survey of Jankowski’s award-winning work of the past five years, shown at the Venice and Whitney Biennials and in museums worldwide, features two recent projects, Hollywoodschnee (Hollywood Snow, 2004), a wickedly perverse video in which various members of the German media risk life and limb in their search for transcendent meaning, and 16mm Mystery (2004), a collaboration with the Brothers Strause, the special-effects wizards of The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Jankowski also presents No One Better than You (2004), What Remains (2004), This I Played Tomorrow (2003), filmed at Rome’s famed Cinecittà studios, and The Holy Artwork (2001). Program 100 min.
Monday, February 28, 8:00. T2

Anri Sala (Paris and Berlin)

The Albanian-born Anri Sala’s internationally acclaimed film and media installations interweave personal narratives with explorations of changing society and the individual. His nuanced works, many of them built on the interrelationship of image, sound and language, reflect aesthetic and societal concerns. Sala presents the New York premiere of Now I See (2004), which depicts a fictitious concert by the Icelandic post-glamour art-rock band Trabant and stars a dog-shaped balloon, collapsing the concert documentary genre with music video and religious spectacle. Program 100 min.

Monday, March 7, 8:00. T2

Eve Sussman (New York)

Eve Sussman discusses her work-in-progress The Rape of the Sabine Women, inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1794–99), which she will shoot in Greece in the spring of 2005. She also discusses her installation 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004), recently on view in the Yoshiko and Akio Morita Gallery, a sumptuously choreographed tableau of an extended moment of Diego Velásquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656). Program 100 min.

Monday, March 21, 8:00. T2

T. J.Wilcox (New York)

In his intimate short films, Wilcox explores themes of ideal beauty and mythmaking, history and commemoration, the immortal and the evanescent. The artist creates sumptuously layered imagery by moving between video, 8mm, and 16mm film, and by combining original and found footage, painstakingly collaged animation, and clips from Hollywood and European movies. Wilcox presents a selection of recent work, including Stephen Tennant Homage (1998), The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich (1999), The Little Elephant (2000), Hadrian and Antinous (2000), and several of his Garlands (2003–05), honoring those whom Wilcox regards as forgotten figures of history. Program 90 min.

Monday, April 4, 8:00. T2

Jennifer Montgomery (Chicago)

Montgomery presents and discusses the method of her feature-length film Threads of Belonging (2003), starring Stephanie Barber, Lori Connerley, and Bruce Stater. The narrative frame is daily life at a fictional therapeutic community where doctors live with schizophrenic patients. Characters and events are drawn from case histories and other writings by members of the 1960s antipsychiatry movement. The director, cast, and crew lived together in the house where the story was filmed, combining staged reenactment with improvisation (and very little scripting) so that the dynamics of a real community would come to bear on the fictional one.

Monday, April 11, 8:00. T2

Daniel Eisenberg (Chicago)

Daniel Eisenberg, Chair of the Department of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been making nonfiction independent and avant-garde work for virtually three decades, interrogating "official" histories and investigating personal stories within the context of major social and political events. His most recent feature, Something More than Night (2003, USA/Germany), is a meditation on nighttime Chicago. Filmed without narration, this featurelength essay is a luminous view of the quasi-deserted public spaces of a major urban center in which a kind of beauty informs

alienation. 100 min.

Monday, April 18, 8:00. T2

Matthew Buckingham (Berlin)

Buckingham, whose film installation A Man of the Crowd (2003) was recently acquired by MoMA, presents current projects as well as three films that investigate history as it is inscribed across the American landscape. In Muhheakantuck—Everything Has a Name (2003), the artist examines the ways in which European-American historians and cartographers have erased the indigenous people of the Hudson Valley from cultural memory. In Situation Leading to a Story (1999), Buckingham describes his quest to find the mysterious owner of four amateur movies from the 1920s. And in Amos Fortune Road (1996), two fictional characters on a New Hampshire road trip discover a historical marker about a little-known slave who bought his freedom in 1769. Program approx. 100 min.

Monday, May 9, 8:00. T2

Rodney Graham (Vancouver)

Graham premieres Torqued Chandelier Release (2005). This 35mm silent film installation documents in one continuous take the release of a wound-up illuminated crystal chandelier as it spins and comes to rest. Shot at forty-eight frames per second with the camera on its side, the film is played back at the same frame rate. A second premiere, The Gifted Amateur (2005), is a photo work that evokes the painterly practice of Morris Louis and a sculpture entitled Erasmus, Equestrian that takes the form of a life-size equestrian statue, a functioning wind vane. Graham also discusses Two Generators (1984), Coruscating Cinnamon Granules (1996), and Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003), the latter recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art.

Monday, May 23, 8:00. T2

Adrian Paci

"When we came to Italy from Albania, we managed to settle down in Milan, leaving behind a country in ruin…." Paci confronts the experience of an artist living in exile in videos that are at once haunting and tender. On the occasion of his first New York exhibition, opening at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center on October 23, the artist presents seven videos, including the New York premiere of pilgrIMAGE (2005), based on a fifteenth-century Albanian legend; Vajtojca (2002), in which the artist stages his own death ritual; and the luminous Turn On (2004), a highlight of the 2005 Venice Biennale. Program 90 min.

Monday, October 17, 8:00. T2

Stephen Vitiello

Stephen Vitiello, who lives in Virginia, is a sound and media artist interested in the physicality of sound and its potential to define spatial environments. His projects include mixed-media sound installations, performance, and Internet and CD-ROM productions. Vitiello documents a series of installations in which he has examined the visual, inaudible properties of low frequency sound waves (Wind in the Trees, 2005), and has used photocells to translate light frequencies into sound (Light Readings, 2004). The artist discusses these and other recent works that draw upon sounds from the environment (Yanomami Recordings, 2003, and World Trade Center Recordings: Winds after Hurricane Floyd, 1999/2002). Program 90 min.

Monday, November 14, 8:30. T2

An Evening with Keith Sonnier

A maverick who has pioneered artistic applications of technology for several decades, Keith Sonnier (New York) works with neon, video, and transmission in inventive ways. His investigations have taken him far from his beginnings in a SoHo of Rauschenberg assemblage and interdisciplinary “actions.” Sonnier consistently frames his media and installation works in the context of communications culture and urbanism. Drawing upon his Louisiana roots, he exploits the more sensual aspects of emitted light. His early use of interactive video display and broadcast media are relevant to art practice today. Program 90 min.

Monday, December 12, 8:00. T2

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