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.
