Video from the True Collection, Sept. 11-Oct. 6, Bruce/Floyd Gallery, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU
The history of video art is resplendent with examples of popular culture’s impact on the genre. Artists have reframed content from television, the internet, and other sources of media, into broadcasts of their own creative contributions. Elsewhere, artists have looked to forms of live entertainment as sites of mass appeal and spectacle, navigating the interplay of individualism and collectivism.
Artists Stephen Dean, Takeshi Murata, and Anri Sala each touch on cultural gathering points — in the forms of popular media and public entertainment — as places of group consciousness.
Join us for this month’s projection: Monster Movie, 2005 by Takeshi Murata. It’s a single-channel video transferred to DVD, 4 minutes, with sound by Plate Tectonics. A shower of bright color and sound, Murata uses genre movies as raw material (in this case, 1981’s forgotten Caveman). By tweaking codec software used to compress images and other data for digital storage, Marata converts motion in the original into painterly, moving abstractions.
The True Collection is a private holding of cutting-edge art assembled by Seattle-based collectors William and Ruth True. Consisting of important works in video, photography, and other media by an international roster of both established and emerging artists, the collectors are steadfast in their patronage of contemporary art, daringly collecting fresh and emergent forms of art-making.
