The Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn in Moving Image

Coined the “Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn,” the legendary Parachute Jump at Coney Island was built in 1939 for the World’s Fair in Queens—but no need to travel to South Brooklyn to see the site. Leslie Thornton, a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics and whose practice brings together cinema, video, digital media, and installation, has fixed her lens on the landmark—not once but three times. In a moving image triptych exploring nature and technology, memory and place, Thornton follows the flight of a bird through three iterations of the same image to her imaginary space—a whole new universe, she’s said, that’s much different from the world we live in. “I do work in which you have your cake and you eat it too; so I have seduction and I have critical distance.”

On view at Winkleman Gallery through June 22, 2013.

Video courtesy of Winkleman Gallery and GalleryLOG.