Thanks For Sharing: Tremaine Gallery Opens 2012-2013 Season by Showcasing Media Artists
Posted August 29, 2012
What is our relationship to the pervasive influence of media in our lives? Artists in this exhibition create video parodies, visual archives, photo montages, and films to express the humor, order, oppressiveness and fantasy found in the media we habitually consume. As our daily reality increasingly includes technology, we must ask ourselves, how significant is it? How does our brain filter and organize the information and imagery we are presented with?
Artists, under the influence of and experimenting with digital media, are showing us alternative ways to process it all. Thanks For Sharing brings together four artists: Dina Kelberman, Jillian Mcdonald, Joe McKay, and Alan Resnick, who explore various forms of digital media, from collections of images and videos acquired from browsing the internet, to specific images culled from Google’s “Street View” mapping project, to fake, inscrutable parodies of YouTube instructional videos, to television and motion picture footage from popular vampire romances.
‘I’m Google’ by Dina Kelberman features collections of web-sourced images compiled via Tumblr with each image (or video) visually relating to the next. This manually compiled collection began as a precursor to Google’s popular ‘search by image’ feature, which was launched in 2011. Kelberman has found a way to transform random imagery into a coherent visual catalogue. She has also collaborated with Alan Resnick to compile another collection of images, ‘Our Findings’, comprised of over 800 images of banal frames from the The Simpsons television show.
Resnick provides us with a hilarious set of YouTube videos. His persona presents himself as an instructor in a series of web-based tutorials. Tutorials are a very common genre of video found on YouTube and Resnick provides us with what appear to be sincere informational videos which in fact are parodies of themselves, demonstrating an expertise in ineptitude.
In Jillian Mcdonald’s video artwork, ‘Hunger’, the artist inserts herself digitally into popular vampire television series and film scenes. As the (replaced) ingénue hopeful of shared immortality, she is locked in endless staring contests with the leading male vampires from these stories who share brooding good looks, apparent youth, advanced vampire years and immortality's curse. The video makes explicit our starring role in the escapist fantasies popular culture offers us.
Joe McKay finds a humorous exploit in Google’s mapping feature, ‘Street View’ by locating images of Google’s camera vehicle in reflections found on random buildings. Turning the whole Google map project on its head, the watcher becomes the watched, exposing where ‘Big Brother’ lurks: usually across the street or around the corner. McKay also edits images to uncover fantastical objects that reside at once in his imagination and in our everyday environment.
The exhibition is on view September 7 through October 7, 2012. An opening reception will be held Saturday, September 8 from 4 - 6 p.m.
Please phone (860) 435 - 4423 for more information about Thanks For Sharing at The Tremaine Gallery or visit hotchkiss.org/arts. For more information about individual artists in the exhibition please visit their websites: dinakelberman.com, jillianmcdonald.net, joemckaystudio.com, and alanresnick.info.
