Cesarco made this portrait of his father, who was a doctor, shortly after he was diagnosed with cancer. The camera lingers on him, posed in his office as if for a still photograph, with a melancholy that suggests final contact or farewell. “The work documents both a constructed and an anticipated memory,” the artist said. In fact, the video shows his filmic portrait projected in the same space in which it was made, now empty.
Gallery label from Chosen Memories, April 30–September 9, 2023
Research in progress; information about this work may be incomplete.
Murray Guy Gallery, New York
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York and Caracas, 2011
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017
London, Tate Modern, Level 2 Gallery, "Present Memory", July 10 - October 31, 2010
If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).
MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.
If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].
This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].