Works by:
Dara Birnbaum, Shana Moulton, Michael Smith, and Bruce and
Norman Yonemoto
For our August Program, EAI is presenting works by artists
who deal with
mediocrity, melodrama, and their relationship to the moving
image. The
program is structured like an evening spent watching television.
The channel keeps changing, and on every station, melodrama
rules the airwaves.
This program repeats every Thursday from October
6 - 27
two seatings per night, 7:30pm &
10pm
After a hard day at work, most people unwind in front of
the television. TV allows people to take a break from their
own lives and live vicariously through familiar strangers
on a screen. Fantastic situations abound on the airwaves,
but there is also a wealth of the ordinary and the melodramatic.
People come home from the office and watch sitcoms set in
fictional offices. This is how millions of people spend
their brief and fleeting leisure time. Why?
This program presents video works by five artists who explore
the strange phenomena that arise from living so closely
with melodrama.
Dara Birnbaum
Dara Birnbaum's provocative video works are among the most
influential and innovative contributions to the contemporary
discourse on art and television. In her videotapes and multi-media
installations, Birnbaum applies both low-end and high-end
video technology to subvert, critique or deconstruct the
power of mass media images and gestures to define mythologies
of culture, history and memory. Through a dynamic language
of images, music and text, she exposes the media's embedded
ideological meanings and posits video as a means of giving
voice to the individual.
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton has created a character named Cynthia who
wears clothing embedded with medical devices and surrounds
herself with inspirational new age knickknacks. In a series
of episodic videos, performances, and installations, Moulton
depicts Cynthia's search for purpose, fulfillment and salvation
through her banal home decorations. Played by Moulton herself,
Cynthia struggles to cope with life’s little struggles
by creating her own reality out of the mundane.
Michael Smith
Michael Smith is a video and performance artist who invokes
the routines of popular comedy to articulate the banality
and hype of mass consumer culture, and the isolation of
those whose inner lives are defined by it. In a series of
videotapes, performances and installations, which he has
produced since the late 1970s, Smith chronicles the trivial
dreams and adventures of his eponymous alter-ego, the bland,
deadpan "Mike," a postmodern Everyman who believes
everything and understands nothing in his media-saturated
world.
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
California-based artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, brothers
who have been producing videotapes collaboratively since
1976, deconstruct and rewrite the vernacular of the mass
media. Ironically employing the image-language and narrative
syntax of popular forms such as soap opera, Hollywood melodrama
and television advertising, the Yonemotos work from "the
inside out" to expose the media's pervasive manipulation
of contemporary reality and fantasy, individual and collective
identity.
Michael Smith. Down in the Rec Room, 1979, re-edited
1981, 13:38 min, color, sound.
Michael Smith. Mike, 1987, 2:43 min, color, sound.
Shana Moulton. Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster
Remix, 2004, 8:13 min, color, sound.
For more information about the artists in this program please
visit:www.eai.org
