Artprojx Cinema presents
Untied Tastes of America
artist’s films and video
selected by David Gryn
Yael Bartana, Slater Bradley, Meredith Danluck, Kota Ezawa, Dara Friedman, Jesper Just, Ryan McGinley, Ryan McNamara, Takeshi Murata, Rashaad Newsome, Martha Rosler, Mungo Thomson.
28th Hamburg International Short Film Festival, May 29th – June 4th 2012 www.shortfilm.com
Programme
Screenings: Thursday 31 May at 7.45pm and 9.30pm
Zeise Kinos. Friedensallee 7. 22765 Hamburg www.zeise.de
Programme Rerun: Sunday 3rd June 5:30 pm at “3001 Kino” www.3001-kino.de
What is America? What is the state of American culture/society today? These questions, so often asked the world over that it has almost become a banal enquiry into the general state of humanity, have never been so important as they are today. Globalisation is perceived and experienced by many to be synonymous with American culture and ideology. At the same time, this sense of the omnipotence of American culture is under severe strain in the wake of the global financial meltdown. To observe American culture today is perhaps to witness the (in)glorious ending of a particular way of life; a culture in decline; a society undergoing traumatic restructuring.
These are works by both American and foreign artists that explore the blurred borderlands of American culture and society. What is explored in these works is not America as a fixed, geographical location but America as an ‘idea/ideal’; a continuously evolving and shifting congeries of emotions, places, powers, infrastructures, populations and visions. Curatorial Text by Paul Goodwin.
Yael Bartana – Tuning
Slater Bradley – Don’t Let Me Disappear
Meredith Danluck – Psychic Space (from North of South, West of East)
Kota Ezawa – Brawl
Jesper Just – Sirens of Chrome
Ryan McGinley – Entrance Romance (it felt like a kiss)
Ryan McGinley – Friends Forever
Ryan McNamara – The Latest in Blood and Guts
Takeshi Murata – Infinite Doors
Rashaad Newsome – The Conductor
Martha Rosler – God Bless America
Mungo Thomson – Untitled (TIME)
Double-bill
Dara Friedman – Musical & Dancer
http://festival.shortfilm.com/index.php?id=3364&L=1
Rosler’s simple and direct powerful anti-war message, and with Bartana a play on the national anthem. Newsome’s hip-hop hands meets Orff’s Carmina Burana, Bradley provides an alienated wondering around NY, McGinley plays with the power of advertising and pop culture, Danluck goes to the very bleak edge of David Lynch and John Waters territory. Murata takes on our obsessive TV culture and McNamara fuses performance, image and film to observe the absurd and difficult in our viewing culture. Jesper Just drives us around the economically challenged downtown USA city and confronts African-American stereotypes of women. Ezawa distills American culture into his unique animation aesthetic, whilst Thomson shows us the history of the US via all the covers of Time magazine. In a separate double-bill Friedman fills NY with the breakout song and Miami with dance.
David Gryn the Director of Artprojx works in collaboration with leading and emerging contemporary art galleries, artists, art museums and art fairs. Artprojx has worked with Art Basel Miami Beach (2011/12), Frieze Art Fair, ICA, Tate Britain, Whitney Museum (Mark Wallinger), Sadie Coles HQ (Wilhelm Sasnal), Salon 94 (Takeshi Murata), Gavin Brown enterprise (Dara Friedman), Gagosian (Dexter Dalwood), White Cube (Christian Marclay), Hauser & Wirth (Marcel Broodthaers), Victoria Miro Gallery (William Eggleston), The Modern Institute (Jeremy Deller) and many more.
Many thanks to the artist’s galleries:
Elizabeth Dee (Ryan McNamara)
Galleria Raffaella Cortese (Martha Rosler, Yael Bartana)
Gavin Brown’s enterprise (Dara Friedman)
Gavlak Gallery (Mungo Thomson)
James Cohan Gallery (Jesper Just)
Marlborough Gallery (Rashaad Newsome)
Murray Guy (Kota Ezawa)
Renwick Gallery (Meredith Danluck)
Salon 94 (Takeshi Murata)
Team Gallery (Slater Bradley, Ryan McGinley)
Contact:
David Gryn
david@artprojx.com
+447711127848
www.artprojx.com
More information:
Yael Bartana
Tuning, 2001
one channel video
2 min
A single show, fixed frames video of a woman wearing a suit “Trapped inside the ritual! Of humming the U.S. National anthem while giving a military salute. She is accompanied by an orchestra off-camera playing the anthem’s music.
Yael Bartana (Israel, 1971) represented Poland at the 2011 Venice Biennial. She has been interested in relationships of power since a very early age, particularly, in instances of crude conflict. Her work simulates the imagery of history and political advertising using language drawn from old movies and magazines, while appealing to the discourse on power. Her films are marked by a unique sense of timelessness though they are underscored by a strong political concern, commenting on both social control as well as the innermost mechanisms of oral and visual language. Merging music and performance, Bartana notably stages a potent counterpoint of social roles.
Slater Bradley
Don’t Let Me Disappear, 2009-11
HD video projection, color, sound,
10:25 min
Though he has worked in a variety of media, Bradley is best known for his work in film. Don’t Let Me Disappear is a highly literate work which functions as an update on his previously shown Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which follows Bradley’s Doppelgänger, model and actor Benjamin Brock, as he wanders alone through New York City. Brock, who distinctly resembles Bradley, has been a consistent subject of the artist’s work over the past decade. While he acts in part as a stand-in for the artist, he does not necessarily portray him directly, instead representing a variety of figures, a kind of everyman.
The work strongly alludes to perhaps the best-known wanderer of New York City, The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. Like the Doppelgänger, Salinger’s iconically alienated character walks aimlessly through New York’s streets, critical of and emotionally removed from his surroundings. The Doppelgänger perceives an artificiality as he examines the city; his anguished expression as he absorbs the city recalls Holden’s condemnation of its “phonies.” At the end of Bradley’s film, the Doppelgänger finds and puts on a red hunting hat, identical to the one described in the novel, and in doing so transforms into Holden.
The film depicts the New York City of E.B. White’s famous essay Here is New York. White divides New York into three separate cities: that of the native New Yorker, that of the commuter, and, the most significant of the three, that of the transplant, for whom New York is a final destination. The inhabitant of this third New York, paradoxically, is surrounded by people but perpetually alone. Though he has long resided in New York, Bradley originates from San Francisco, and the film shows his delicate relationship with the City. It is one of intimacy and distance, awe and terror, adoration and distrust.
The Doppelgänger observes and touches the built environment and crowds of the city, all without actually engaging any person or thing. Bradley continually draws attention to the act of walking: the video opens with a shot of legs waiting at a crosswalk, then follows the walking feet of its subject, waiting two and half minutes before showing the rest of his person. Here, Bradley refers to to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the flâneur, Flaubert’s archetypal figure who strolls through the modern city. Benjamin’s flâneur perceptively observes his surroundings but remains wholly uninvolved with them. Department store window displays, like the ones the Doppelgänger desperately examines, are a product of the flâneur’s prevalence in the post-industrial city.
Throughout the video, the Doppelgänger’s disembodied voice mumbles brief passages from little-known Russian author Mark Levi’s mysterious 1934 Novel with Cocaine, which chronicles an adolescent male’s descent into hedonism and drug addiction during Russia’s tumultuous years 1916 through 1919. Like the novel, Don’t Let Me Disappear examines the depravity of a young man’s existence during a period of national strife.
Meredith Danluck
Psychic Space (from North of South, West of East), 2012
Hi-Definition video
6 min
Psychic Space (from North of South, West of East), is a a scene taken from Danluck’s feature film North of South, West of East in which a disgruntled auto industry worker, played by actor Ben Foster, seeks solace and escape from the numbing repetition of the factory through huffing solvent and nodding off in the men’s room. The simple beauty and rich inner life of the nod almost balance out the industrial toilet’s piss stained floor and grime caked walls. The film’s sound design rises and falls, creating a narrative arc on which to project a beginning, middle and end. Though one would think watching a man pass out on the toilet for over six minutes might get boring, the driving sound combined with Foster’s divine performance play into collective expectations of thrill, suspense and even comedy.
Meredith Danluck is an artist and filmmaker living and working in New York City. Danluck’s work mines the rich territory of the American dream through the tropes of Hollywood and narrative archetypes. She has exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial, Reina Sofia Museum, MoMA, PS1 Museum among others. She has screened films at a number of festivals including Toronto International
Film Festival, SXSW, Byron Bay, DocNYC and Margaret Mead. Her most ambitious work up to date is a four channel feature film entitled, North of South, West of East which was commissioned by Ballroom Marfa as part of a show called Autobody, curated by Neville Wakefield. These four narrative films play simultaneously in symphony. Danluck is represented by the Renwick Gallery.
Kota Ezawa
Brawl, 2008
digital animation transferred to 16mm, sound
Edition of 10
4:11 min
Brawl, 2008 is a 16mm animated film of a fight at a Pistons-Pacers basketball game that began with a foul and a cup of beer thrown from the stands and ended with the suspension of 9 NBA players. Accustomed to tracking the linear movement of the ball through the court, the televised video feed jerkily shifts and pans and zooms throughout the arena to show multiple points of conflict simultaneously unfolding. Ezawa describes the scene as reminiscent of a Rubens painting, for instance The Battle of the Amazons, 1598, where tension is dispersed across the surface. He layers multiple audio recordings into the film’s soundtrack, mixing the voices of the announcers with the sounds of players and audience coming from the stadium floor and catacombs.
Kota Ezawa transforms seminal moments in media history into vector-based images and animations reminiscent of classic cartoons. The resulting imagery, somewhere between Andy Warhol and South Park, is then re-presented in a number of formats including video, film and slide projection as well as lightbox, etching and collage. Ezawa’s material ranges in source from the iconic to the obscure, from commerce to politics, to entertainment and art: from the televised footage of the reading of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial through Richard Burton’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s on/off-screen marital strife John Lennon, Susan Sontag and Joseph Beuys speaking publicly on art as political protest, to the assassinations of two American presidents and the home videos of celebrities. Kota Ezawa was born in 1969 in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. He has had solo exhibitions at Matrix,
Jesper Just
Sirens of Chrome, 2010
RED transferred to Blu-ray
Edition of 7 + 2 AP
12:38 min
Excerpted from ‘Sirens of Chrome’: Jennifer Frias, Associate Curator, UCR Sweeney Art Gallery.
Gender and identity come into play as Just re-imagines the role of women to contradict mainstream pop-culture’s association with men and cars – the archetypal relationship between object and desire. In classical Hollywood cinema, as feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey defined it; women are almost always represented in a sexualized way in order to appeal to a male audience. The spectator is in a masculine subject position and the woman as the object of desire. Just defies this argument in creating a reversal of roles where the women are the protagonists exhibiting two modes of the male gaze – the voyeur and the fetishist.
Just presents his unconventional storytelling with conventional elements of slick Hollywood films by exploring the dynamics of African-American women and defying their portrayal in mainstream cinema. Just has said, in making Sirens, he wanted to challenge the long list of films that depicted African-American women as one-dimensional sexual beings, savages and lascivious. From Birth of a Nation in the early 1900s to the “Blaxploitation” films of the 1970s, Black women were type-casted as carnal and promiscuous, often as prostitutes or “jezebels.” According to Just, the actresses in the video were allotted the opportunity to tamper into the persona of their role. In essence, the actresses took control of their portrayal by either confronting the associations with Black women cinema stereotypes or appropriating the identity commonly conveyed by the opposite sex. While the physical presence of a male figure is non-existent in the storyline, the women become lead figures embodying their being in a masculine domain.
Jesper Just’s films create a world in which both the viewer and the protagonist oscillate between dominance and submission. Having made over a dozen films since graduating from the Danish Academy of Art in 2003, Just’s work is characterized by romance-soaked narratives and a shared sense of mood, atmospheric milieus. Just’s pictures are notably conjured through the manipulation of both social and cinematic convention; his use of appropriation mutates to bend the conventions of mainstream Hollywood productions while building from their structure. Heavily influenced by film noir aesthetics, Just reveres the films of iconic directors such as Bob Fosse, Lars von Trier, Alfred Hitchock, David Lynch and Elia Kazan. Here, Just’s influences assist in informing visual tones through stylized sets and wistful music, elements as equally important to the films as the characters seen within them.
Shot on a variety of film stock, including 16 mm and 35 mm, Just’s works are rich with the textures of the medium. Just’s significant production value and international access to lush spaces and surrealistic backdrops yield epic works crafted with seductive cinematic charge.
Jesper Just was born in 1974 in Copenhagen, Denmark and lives and works in New York, NY. His work is in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate London, London, UK and Sammlung Julia Stoschek, Germany among others. Just’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan, The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
Film stills and film courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen. Copyright © Jesper Just 2010
Ryan McGinley
Entrance Romance (it felt like a kiss), 2010
color video, sound,
3:30 min
In Entrance Romance (it felt like a kiss) Ryan McGinley presents famous fashion model Carolyn Murphy (best known as the flawless face of Estée Lauder) with exquisitely drawn-out frames that showcase her most minute expressions as she endures actions of love and violence. Glass-shard explosions and gas-fueled flames are illuminated by soft golden light and set to a blissful soundtrack of meditative chanting. The result is a commingling of chaos and control as cinematic play and thrill-seeking collide with fleshly innocence and vulnerability. Just as the artist’s most well known photographs capture a youthful sublime within the boundless American landscape, Entrance Romance is a sumptuous portrait of enduring American adventure.
Ryan McGinley
Friends Forever, 2010
color & black and white video, sound,
5 min
Friends Forever presents a portrait of two young bands, Smith Westerns and Girls, and their fans. Shot at Pitchfork Music Festival 2010, McGinley closely observes details of the live performances with a fan’s adoring eye, his lens awash with atmospheric blurs and kaleidoscopic light amidst the sonic haze of warm, psychedelic guitars and reverb-loaded percussion. Friends Forever is an evolution of McGinley’s deep interest in the genre of rock photography, as seen in his 2006 photographs of fans at Morrissey concerts.
Youth, liberation and the joy of losing yourself in the moment are elements that feature throughout Ryan McGinley’s work, from his early roots in documenting the urban adventures of his downtown Manhattan friends to his subsequent cross-country travels in utopian environments throughout America to his most recent studio portraits. McGinley’s elaborate and rigorous process of photo-making creates moments of breathtaking beauty: naked feral kids poised in ecstatic abandon. The lack of clothing and other contemporary signifiers along with the archetypical landscapes give the photos a sense of timelessness in which the viewer can project his or her own story.
Over the years McGinley’s work has evolved from documenting reality toward creating settings where the situations are choreographed. The process of carefully staging and directing ‘happenings’, often in beautiful rural landscapes, is increasingly more cinematic in tone, while retaining the spontaneity of his early work.
Ryan McNamara
The Latest in Blood and Guts, 2009
black and white digital video with sound
5 min
Thirty five years ago in July, a newsreel jammed and could not be played during the Sarasota, Florida morning news program Suncoast Digest. Chubbuck, the host, brushed the glitch aside and said, “In keeping with Channel 40′s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first-attempted suicide.” She then pulled out a .38 revolver from a bag of puppets she kept underneath her desk and shot herself behind the ear.
In one sense, The Latest in Blood and Guts is a memorial for the late newscaster Christine Chubbuck; it is also a rehearsal of Ryan McNamara’s childhood dream to be a variety show host. The video proposes a reenactment of trauma towards a therapeutic resolution that results in macabre parody. The friction between what the person portrays themselves as and what they are, dancing or dying, comically questions the distinction between life and death, and the paradoxical lifelessness of the moving image.
Ryan McNamara creates situation-specific works that collectively form an expanded view of participation within art production. His works involve other artists, viewers and dance professionals as collaborators. Created before and during after the performative events, photography and objects are integral to McNamara’s practice. He forms a uniquely social discourse, developing events that break with traditional notions of performance and embrace realism and interaction as necessary aspects of viewing experience. The participants themselves are central to the primary activity or action and McNamara is the engaged enabler of a situation he has authored with an undefined final outcome.
Welcoming uncertainty, McNamara has enthusiastically and intentionally pursued temporary and collaborative projects as diverse as biennial exhibitions, museum benefits, and one night performances in a variety of public and private spaces resulting in a truly fluid practice that intertwines the art community, social networks and technology.
Takeshi Murata
Infinite Doors, 2010,
digital video, color, sound
2:04 min
Infinite Doors draws on the determined staying power and unremitting stimulation of prize-oriented game show culture. Utilizing clips from The Price is Right, Murata edits a kinetic series of prize unveils. Unrelenting audience applause and an excessively animated announcer make the clip at once comical and peculiar. The superfluity of reward and overload of visual cues become absurd in their excess and begin to smother the very excitement they are meant to induce.
Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film/Video/Animation. Murata produces extraordinary digital works that refigure the experience of animation. His innovative practice and constantly evolving processes range from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to exacting manipulations of the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology. Whether altering appropriated footage from cinema (B movies, vintage horror films), or creating Rorschach-like fields of seething color, form and motion, Murata produces astonishing visions that redefine the boundaries between abstraction and recognition.
Murata has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Peres Projects, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Eyebeam, New York; FACT Centre, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, Foxy Production, New York, and Deitch Projects, New York, among others.
Rashaad Newsome
The Conductor, 2005-2009
six-part video installation with sound
Dimensions variable
6:18mins
Rashaad Newsome’s “The Conductor (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi)” and “The Conductor (Primo Vere, Omnia Sol Temperat),” are the first and second parts of an ambitious six- part video installation that sets Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” against a video montage of expressive hand gestures extracted from popular rap videos, and a musical background of hip-hop beats. As Orff’s iconic oratorio opens with “O Fortuna,” a closely edited sequence of bejeweled gestures appears to conduct the music.
Rashaad Newsome was born in New Orleans, Louisiana where he received a B.A. in Art History at Tulane University before studying Film at Film Video Arts NYC as well as music production and programing at Harvestworks NYC . Newsome has exhibited nationally and internationally at such creditable institutions and Galleries as: The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; PS1MoMA, New York, NY; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Connecticut; Centre Pompidou, Paris; ar/ge Kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano, Italy; Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia and Galerie Stadpark, Krems, Austria. Recent awards include: 2012 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, New York, NY, McColl Center for Visual Art Artist Residency, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2011, Artist in Residence, Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle, Washington; 2010 The Urban Artist Initiative individual Artist Grant, UAI, New York, NY; 2009 Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Visual Arts Grant, New York, NY and 2009 BAC Community Arts Regrant, New York, NY.
Martha Rosler
God Bless America, 2006
One channel video
1 min
In this video work, Rosler presents a short but incisive statement. A Mechanical toy figure dresses as an American soldier plays “God Bless America” on a trumpet. The camera pans down, revealing that the toy’s camouflage-clad trouser leg has been rolled up to uncover a mechanism that looks uncannily like a prosthetic limb.
Martha Rosler has been an important figure in art since the 1960′s, contributing ground-breaking works in media including video, photography, installation, performance, photo-text and critical writing. Her work addresses social life and the public sphere, often staking out feminist and anti-war positions. She has been included in numerous international exhibitions, most recently the Singapore Biennale; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, PS1 in Queens, and other venues; UnMonumental at The New Museum in New York; Documenta 12; and Skulptur Projekte Münster; and Ambitions d’Art at Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne, France.
Among Rosler’s best-known works are her photomontages from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72), which combines war scenes with images of domestic comfort and high design. In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosler revisited the photomontage format, but reflecting the new spaces and technologies of war and its representations, in such works as Prospect for Today, Point and Shoot, and Invasion (2008).
Mungo Thomson
Untitled (TIME), 2010
DVD color video, silent
2:31 min
Mungo Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) flips through every cover of Time Magazine, from the first to the present, at a rate of one image per frame, 24 frames per second (i.e. 24 Time Magazine covers per second). This video can be seen as a study in cultural history done almost subliminally, as each viewer instantaneously recognizes specific images and text.
Mungo Thomson was born in 1969 in Woodland, California, and lives in Los Angeles and Berlin. He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1994, and received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach; John Connelly Presents, New York; the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include those at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Menil Collection, Houston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Thomson’s work has also been shown in several biennial exhibitions, including 12th Istanbul Biennial in Istanbul, Turkey; the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York; the 2008 Le Havre Biennale in Le Havre, France; and the 2004 California Biennial at the Orange Country Museum of Art, Newport Beach. Writings on his work have appeared in publications such as Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, and Uovo.
Dara Friedman Double-bill
Dara Friedman
Musical 2007-2008
High-definition digital video
48 min
Dara Friedman’s video Musical plays upon the vitality of city life, especially on the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan, where unexpected and memorable encounters can be a daily occurrence. Friedman, who notes that she wants to “turn the volume up on the song that’s going on in your head as you’re walking down the street,” is interested in blurring the traditional separation between art and life, and between artist and audience. Like pebbles thrown into a lake,each performance causes a ripple effect that lasting a moment before the city returns to business-as-usual.
Dara Friedman
Dancer, 2011
Super 16mm film transferred to HD video, black & white, sound
25 min
Dancer documents a series of dances that took place on the streets of Miami. In the film, the performers have two dance partners: the camera and the city. The dancers, over 60 in all, represent a range of styles and ages – classical, street, ethnic and improvised. Movement was developed with choreography for and with the camera in hand. The work is in black and white, filmed with a hand-cranked Bolex in Super 16mm. The camera allows itself to be led, the film frame delineating the parameters of the stage, and the barrel lens sometimes catching the movement merely out of the corner of its eye. Inspired by the late Pina Bausch (1940-1990), Dara Friedman is not necessarily interested in “how people move, but rather, what moves them”. Performances are enmeshed with the soundtrack which paces the film throughout its 25 minute running time.
Dara Friedman is best known for her film and video installations, in which she employs techniques of Structuralist filmmaking to depict the lushness, ecstasy, and energy of everyday life. She often distills, reverses, loops, or otherwise alters familiar sounds and sights, drawing attention to the distinct sensory acts of hearing and seeing. Whether her work portrays a series of narrative fragments or a single evocative scene repeated over and over, Friedman heightens the emotional impact by cutting directly to the film’s climax in order to, as she puts it, “get to the part you really care about.”
Born in 1968 in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, Dara Friedman now lives and works in Miami. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Miami Art Museum (2012, 2001); The Whitney Museum of American Art (2010) Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2011, 2007, 2002); The Kitchen, New York (2005); The Wrong Gallery, New York (2004); Kunstmuseum, Thun, Switzerland (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2002); and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2001). Friedman attended University of Miami, School of Motion Pictures (MFA); The Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; and Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York among many others.
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