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Dialogues: Sam Easterson/T.J. Wilcox April 5-June 28, 1998 The third installment of the Walker's Dialogues series that links the arts communities of Minneapolis and New York City features work by Sam Easterson and T.J. Wilcox, two artists who have turned to video and film as their medium of choice. In each case, the artist exhibits an obsessive fascination with the media of film and video in either a structuralist or a narrative manner. As with all of the artists in the series, both Easterson and Wilcox will be commissioned to complete new work for the exhibition. Working in video, Easterson transforms his cameras into hybrid viewing machines that record the unseen in everyday life. Harkening back to the "structuralist" filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s who treated the material of film itself (celluloid, leader tape, projectors) as the content of their work, Easterson uses the video camera to turn around the relationship between the viewer and the world. In Blowout (1995), which was featured in the 1996 Whitney Biennial, Easterson attached a camera to the top of a hot-air popcorn popper. The resulting video shows us the world from the perspective of the machine as the popcorn circles in an abstract dance only to be ejected from the popper by hot air. Whether he is attaching his video cameras to artificial tumbleweeds and rolling them across the western landscape or showing us the view from the inside of a vacuum cleaner, Easterson transforms what we think of as static objects into stage players in their own ballets mechaniques. Wilcox straddles the worlds of film and video and is a prime example of the recent resurgence of visual artists who have chosen to use film (rather than video) in the galleries. Shooting on Super-8 film, he transfers his work to video for editing and then back to 16mm film for projection. In each of his very personal films, he appropriates images from popular culture and history in order to construct a series of baroque and dreamlike narrative landscapes in which he can investigate our collective cultural fascination with various romantic figures. On view in this exhibition will be the artist's first two films: The Escape (of Marie Antoinette) (1996) and The Death and Burial of the First Emperor of China (1997). Premiering will be Stephen Tennant Homage (1998), an installation that focuses on the life of this obscure, if seminal, literary figure who was associated with the Bloomsbury group. It features the writer's grand niece Stella Tennant. Easterson lives and works in Minneapolis and graduated with a BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 1994. He is currently completing a masters degree in landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota. His videos have appeared in a number of group exhibitions, most recently at the 1997 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wilcox graduated in 1989 with a BFA from the School of Visual Art in New York and completed his MFA at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 1995. Most recently, his work has been featured in a solo exhibition at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York, the 1997 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney, and at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Dialogues: Sam Easterson/T.J. Wilcox is made possible by the Jerome Foundation. Curator: Douglas Fogle |