Culver City’s
Mark Moore Gallery has
cultivated a roster that includes several artists fluent in the medium of
video. We offer a look at five such masters of the screen, whose practices
represent a variety of styles and incorporate a range of other media—including
sculpture, performance, and photography.
Josh
Azzarella’s video and photographic works are re-edits of seminal moments
from pop culture and news media that challenge historiography and personal
memory. In
Untitled #23 (“Lynndied”) (2006), for example, the artist
manipulates the dark and widely disseminated images that emerged from Abu
Ghraib, in effect producing an eerie portrait of military excess. In his
two-channel video work
Untitled #142 (Bob Coe from Wasco) (2013), Azzarella
reconstructed and reconfigured minor movements from Hitchcock’s
North by
Northwest (1959), drawing out, to absurdist levels, the moments of suspense
and anticipation for impending events that never occur.
The nine-member collective
Okay Mountain, based in Austin, Texas,
produces installations, sculptural objects, and multi-media assemblage works
that caricature the stock vernacular of mainstream American consumer culture,
including infomercials, promotional advertising brochures, how-tos, and other
self-improvement guides. Presenting a fantastical mash-up of trade-show imagery
that could also function as an ironic advertisement for a popular club night,
their single-channel video
Pre-Show (2013) was recently acquired by the
Wadsworth Atheneum.
Chicago-based artist
Cheryl Pope makes
socially conscious performances and installations that often result in the
creation of video pieces—a form of documentation that becomes artwork in its
own right. Her single-channel video
One of Many, One (2014), created in
collaboration with a group of Chicago youth, attempts to visualize the
inexhaustible chain reaction of lives lost to gun violence. It will feature in
her solo exhibition, “
Chain Reaction,” at Mark Moore Gallery at the end of this month.
Allison
Schulnik has described animation as “the perfect marriage of dancing and
painting.” Her surrealistically detailed, macabre stop-motion animation works,
such as
Mound (2011) and
Eager (2014), resonate with her heavily
impastoed paintings and bewitching ceramics, but thrill in the magic of their
on-screen movement—which the
New York
Times characterized as the “supernatural quickening of ordinarily inert
stuff.” Producing a four-minute video takes the artist anywhere from eight
months to a year of clay-molding, filming, and dreaming.
Shaun
Gladwell’s film works use slow-motion and panoramic movement to capture
both choreographed and spontaneous performances by breakdancers, skateboarders,
and BMX riders in a variety of urban and rural spaces across the
globe—ultimately creating what he describes as visually rhythmic “performative
landscapes.” Shot along the southeastern British seaside,
BMX Channel
(2013) juxtaposes a culturally specific athleticism—the “flatland” freestyle
riding that originated in Southern California—against the foggier and grayer
environment where it now thrives.