"Single Channel - Recent Video Works" selected by Christopher Eamon
05 Sep - 04 Oct 2008
Galerie Thomas Schulte is presenting the project “Single Channel – Recent Video Works” with nine young international artists selected by Christopher Eamon.
Taysir Batniji (Gaza/France)
Elisabetta Benassi (Italy)
Adad Hannah (Canada/USA)
Alex Hubbard (USA)
Kris Lefcoe (Canada/USA)
Zhenchen Liu (China)
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (Canada)
Matt Stokes (UK)
Alejandro Vidal (Spain)
Single-channel video making has had a relatively long history. Partially eclipsed in the 1990s by video installations and video environments, the medium today still
has an immediacy and accessibility that larger more complicated multichannel works do not have. The works included in the presentation “Single Channel – Recent Video Works” at Galerie Thomas Schulte reveal perhaps an even greater sophistication that was not possible in the 70s through mid 90s without today’s mass availability of more complex software. The selection of works is an eclectic but refreshing look at some current practices. This selection avoids of the decades-long practice of video performance as well as an even longer practice of using appropriated film and TV images to produce new works.
That which unites Christopher Eamon’s selection is the artists’ investment of time and energy to realize a unique vision in single channel. Some of the works are meant to be projected, yet all of the works take the flexibility of the medium as a given.
Works such as those by Matt Stokes, Alejandro Vidal, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, and Kris Lefcoe take their starting point squarely in the heart of youth culture. Whether mass or sub-cultural in their subject matter, the spirit of youth in dance, music, eroticism and revolt is most evident. Zhenchen Liu and Taysir Batniji poeti-cally speak of changes in the contemporary world. Avoiding a direct message, the works take on current global issues from the point of view of the individual, which is not to say that these works bare no emotional or political impact. Indeed these are not documentaries and therefore do not in bad faith attempt neutrality. As artworks they speak and release their images to the necessarily subjective responses proper to all viewers. Similarly, the openness of the tableau-like work by Adad Hannah opens up fear, and possibly even humour, in its quiet enduring way. On the surface the videos shown by Alex Hubbard and Elisabetta Benassi have little to do with each other, yet in tipping the camera to the horizontal position in Hubbard’s work, for instance, looking down at the artist’s imaginative activities or in the slow cumulative filming of actual demolition sites in Benassi’s piece, they shift to the horizontal that which is normal at your feet to an eye line perspective becoming vertical moving images without imitating painting in any obvious way.
Christopher Eamon is curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, which is one of the largest private collections for media art, and director of the New Art Trust in San Francisco for promotion of media art. Before he was Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has curated numerous exhibitions with video and media art for e.g. PS1/MoMA, ICA, London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Taysir Batniji (Gaza/France)
Elisabetta Benassi (Italy)
Adad Hannah (Canada/USA)
Alex Hubbard (USA)
Kris Lefcoe (Canada/USA)
Zhenchen Liu (China)
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (Canada)
Matt Stokes (UK)
Alejandro Vidal (Spain)
Single-channel video making has had a relatively long history. Partially eclipsed in the 1990s by video installations and video environments, the medium today still
has an immediacy and accessibility that larger more complicated multichannel works do not have. The works included in the presentation “Single Channel – Recent Video Works” at Galerie Thomas Schulte reveal perhaps an even greater sophistication that was not possible in the 70s through mid 90s without today’s mass availability of more complex software. The selection of works is an eclectic but refreshing look at some current practices. This selection avoids of the decades-long practice of video performance as well as an even longer practice of using appropriated film and TV images to produce new works.
That which unites Christopher Eamon’s selection is the artists’ investment of time and energy to realize a unique vision in single channel. Some of the works are meant to be projected, yet all of the works take the flexibility of the medium as a given.
Works such as those by Matt Stokes, Alejandro Vidal, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, and Kris Lefcoe take their starting point squarely in the heart of youth culture. Whether mass or sub-cultural in their subject matter, the spirit of youth in dance, music, eroticism and revolt is most evident. Zhenchen Liu and Taysir Batniji poeti-cally speak of changes in the contemporary world. Avoiding a direct message, the works take on current global issues from the point of view of the individual, which is not to say that these works bare no emotional or political impact. Indeed these are not documentaries and therefore do not in bad faith attempt neutrality. As artworks they speak and release their images to the necessarily subjective responses proper to all viewers. Similarly, the openness of the tableau-like work by Adad Hannah opens up fear, and possibly even humour, in its quiet enduring way. On the surface the videos shown by Alex Hubbard and Elisabetta Benassi have little to do with each other, yet in tipping the camera to the horizontal position in Hubbard’s work, for instance, looking down at the artist’s imaginative activities or in the slow cumulative filming of actual demolition sites in Benassi’s piece, they shift to the horizontal that which is normal at your feet to an eye line perspective becoming vertical moving images without imitating painting in any obvious way.
Christopher Eamon is curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, which is one of the largest private collections for media art, and director of the New Art Trust in San Francisco for promotion of media art. Before he was Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has curated numerous exhibitions with video and media art for e.g. PS1/MoMA, ICA, London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.