A three-day exhibition featuring recent works by eleven artists using time-based media as an integral part of their artistic practice. The artists participating in the exhibition are all currently enrolled in the MFA Studio Art program at Hunter College in New York City. Each day, the works of three-to-four of these artists will be highlighted at the project space located at the Painting School of the Royal College of Art. 

AMY BRENER

Blue Touch/ Revival #1, 2008

I dip my fingers into florescent ink and smear war stripes under my dad’s eyes, on to the surface of a giant cut-out of his face. I rub the face with gold pigment, scrub it, and spray it with Ocean Breeze air freshener.

This video develops a dialogue between the personal and the generic, between feeling and fluff.  Here is an enactment of grief, but also a negation of it; there is deep feeling present, coupled with deep cynicism. Feeling and cynicism exist on equal planes within the complex field of modern grief. There are no opposing forces, only currents that ebb and flow. The intimate becomes distant, and then intimate again.

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DAVID KAGAN

The Redacted Bunny [Excerpt], 2008-2010

For nearly two years, I have been constructing a meta-narrative with The Redacted Bunny.  Using video, sculpture, and installation, I have sought to create a fantasized diary, as well as a critique of the institutions I exist within or aspire to be part of.  The work focuses around two characters, the Bunny Boy and his mother, who are simultaneously facets of myself and representations of various familial relations.  The narrative begins with the conception of the Bunny Boy, and continues through to his demise and possible resurrection.  Important themes are sexuality, displacement, pressure to perform, the art world, and death.   

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ELLIE KRAKOW

Shine, 2009

My work uses known genres in askew or backwards ways in order to force the imagination to attempt to see something that is not fully represented.  I am interested in how the experience of trying to see, in its curious engagement and inherent failure, parallels the experience of witnessing something secondhand as we do with history and memory.  Shine twists the romantic movie genre, replacing the lovers’ bodies with lights, and the story with a narration that sets up visual expectations that can only be fulfilled in the viewer’s imagination.

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IRA EDUARDOVNA

Roulette, 2009

My video work in the last few years has dealt with re-constructed memories of autobiographical nature that are relevant to our collective experience. I examine issues of migration and identity in flux.

Roulette explores the fundamental elements of Soviet education that encouraged the individual to exhibit self-control, discipline, hard work, obedience and conformism.

In Roulette the female figures perform a repetitive and somewhat Sysiphian action and never reach catharsis. The action fails to produce and is enhanced by the fateful and compulsive repetition.  It therefore carries the death drive within it.

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JESS LEVEY

Untitled, from the nanny series, 2009

Untitled, from The Nanny Series continues to investigate my ongoing interest in the meanings and implications of work. After working as a corporate media professional for nearly a decade, I found working as a nanny a somewhat refreshing way to support my artistic endeavors. The transition from a New York City-based media creative to a domestic helper in a matter of weeks spurred questioning the way in which work arbitrarily defines our sense of self and how dangerous this is — especially in the current economy. But, being a nanny, like working in the office cubicle, has become monotonous and trying. It is both physically and psychologically exhausting and often times the relationship with the child involves a level of intimacy that gravitates towards the uncanny.

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KYLIE LOCKWOOD

The Very Thought of You, 2009

The Very Thought of You is a video documenting my mouth singing a love song at 100x magnification. The sound of my voice was recorded separately though a bad cell phone connection in which the phones were 600 miles apart. I am interested in the juxtaposition between the ample distance that my voice occupies and the intimate closeness to the threshold of my mouth.

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MOLLY MAC FEDYK

Dualist, 2008

Dualist is the first work in the Epitomes series. Epitomes use makeshift physiologies to navigate absurd systems of means, ends, and norms. The dualist is equipped with a crude Cartesian anatomy: his mind and body are connected by a squidgy pineal gland. He thinks all over himself. His thoughts pool at his feet, but he keeps them neatly composed within the rectangular boundaries of his platform. It is elegant abjection.

My practice walks a fine line between absurdity and humanism. Making work is like an elaborate game of charades. I use objects, ideas and costumes assembled from my immediate periphery as props.  I document the charades and systems with video, stills, and sound. As an editor I will approach this footage with relentless formal logic.  I want compositions that diagram and render at the same time.  Work is successful when it is completely convinced of its own absurd formal order but still captures the initial human impulse of the charade. 

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ORIT BEN-SHITRIT

Un-Title, 2009

Although it can be liberating to define ourselves (and by extension, our creative output) in opposition—what we are not as opposed to what we are—this often serves to reinforce the very ideologies (be they theoretical, religious, cultural, or aesthetic) we wish to eschew. As Orit Ben-Shitrit’s video Un-title (2009) reveals, sometimes destruction can actually be a means of emphasizing the power of the canon.  Ben-Shitrit’s humorous and self-referential critique of how Art History is deeply entrenched in nationalist politics and monumentality is a shrewd and aggressive commentary, but it is also a constructive exercise by which the artist effectively locates herself.
– Mara Hoberman

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REBECCA GILBERT

Touch Me, 2009

I search to connect with the impossible—to know the unknowable. I revisit ethereal experiences in an attempt to reproduce them through multimedia objects and video.   My work reveals a relationship with the mediation of something, rather than a relationship with the thing itself.  This video is about serenading a dead icon, Jim Morrison—who, like a ghost, has a lingering presence.

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STEVEN R. ROSE

BLT Sublime, 2009

It is a piece based in simple ingredients, culinarily and algorithmically speaking. Pluck one scenario out of the Hudson River Valley School of Paint, dab on one romantic purveyor of said scenario, and proceed to construct one quintessentially simple sandwich. The rest takes care of itself.

What I find peculiar about BLT is its outdoor setting. My work is predictably based in interior spaces. I consider myself something of a mystic of the living room, a nymph guardian of the domestic emotional void, gathering familial tensions, strange outbursts, and incestuous musings. Or, rather, I am the indifferent couch given the task of feeling the touch of everyone’s buttocks. But, then, I suppose this is the challenge that titillated me with BLT—so often the outside comes in and mixes things up, but why not a little inside/out for a change?

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YULIYA LANINA

Bible Reader, 2009

Yuliya Lanina is a Russian born American artist living and working in New York City. Lanina creates alternate realities in her works—ones based on sexuality, fetishism, and identity. Lanina has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and has been a recipient of many grants and awards.

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