Susan Hiller

 

 "With a multimedia practice extending over 40 years, Susan Hiller was one of the most influential artists of her generation. Since first making innovative use of audio and visual technology in the early 1980s, her groundbreaking installations, multi-screen videos and audio works have achieved international recognition. Each of Hiller’s works is based on specific cultural artefacts from our society, which are used as basic materials. Many pieces explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79), near death experiences (Channels, 2013) and collective experiences of unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity (Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983-4; Psi Girls, 1999; Witness, 2000). Hiller’s powerful and resonant films range from the J Street Project (2002-05), a chillingly extensive search for every street sign in Germany bearing the word Juden (Jew), to The Last Silent Movie (2007), which also documents disappearance and absence, although this time through speech recordings of dying or extinct languages. Her psychologically charged and thematically varied practice amounts to an impassioned plea for the joys and mysteries associated with irrationality.
Susan Hiller (1940-2019) was born in Tallahasse, Florida. After graduating from Smith College in 1961, she went on to do doctoral studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science Foundation fellowship. However she abandoned anthropology to become an artist, and from the mid ‘60s was based mainly in London. Her career has been recognised by major solo and survey exhibitions at institutions including Bloomberg SPACE, London, UK. "(lissongallery.com)

 

Phil Solomon - Experimental Filmm & Digital Painting

Philip Stewart Solomon (1954 – 2019) was an American experimental filmmaker noted for his work with both film and video. Recently, Solomon has earned acclaim for a series of films that incorporate machinima made using games from the Grand Theft Auto series.His films are often described as haunting and lyrica
"Phil Solomon, who used repurposed footage, manipulated images and striking soundtracks to make evocative experimental films that were widely admired by hard-core cinephiles, died on April 20 near Boulder, Colo. He was 65.
Solomon, an emeritus professor of cinema studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, took up the experimental-film mantle in an era when the lure of feature filmmaking was irresistible to most of the creative young minds in cinema. His films, usually relatively short, did not have stars or plots in any conventional sense; he was after something more cerebral.
“Phil’s many films were examples of a truly unique style of what is sometimes called ‘visionary cinema,’ a term coined by P. Adams Sitney to describe films which were primarily concerned with the visual experience rather than with a story or narrative situation,” Jeanne M. Liotta, an experimental filmmaker and colleague of Mr. Solomon’s at the university, said by email. “Phil considered the film frame as a painting — a rectangle full of tensions, textures and pulls — rather than as a window through which to daydream.”(nytimes.com)

As one of the key filmmakers of the American avant-garde, Phil Solomon is known for his ability to extraordinarily beautiful, deeply affecting film works that are often composed out of abandoned or lost pieces of celluloid. In many cases, these works employ an optical printing process to further degrade, burn and amplify certain figurative elements, almost to the point of pure abstraction. And indeed, one could easily view many of his films as great painterly efforts with pronounced sensual and dimensional qualities.

The “Digital Painting” series (2012-2013)
dimensions variable, silent, 47” LCD display
Notes from the artist: “Being an artist who has spent a great deal of his adult life exploring the haptic sense of the (treated and untreated) patinas of film texture and film grain, I have approached the squared off geometries of the digital domain with some degree of reluctance and aesthetic caution. In the past few months, however, I have been employing, various orchestrated chance operations, a sort of digi-roulette wheel - and almost accidentally bumped into what I can begin to think of as a possible “pixel aesthetic” - something that perhaps Cézanne, Francis Bacon or Klimt might have appreciated.

Jeremy Blake - Digital Art

Jeremy Blake (1971 –2007) was an American digital artist and painter. His work included projected DVD installations, Type C prints, and collaborative film projects.

"Blake completed his undergraduate studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree from California Institute of the Arts in 1995. He began making a name for himself in the late 1990s with his large, semi-abstract digital projections that were neither photographs nor paintings. These geometric forms with photographic images were reminiscent of movie scenes. Later, he started creating digital video sequences that were neither films, not paintings but appeared to be both. Blake called his works “time-based paintings”. In 2000s Blake started including narrative and documentary elements in his works. The Winchester video trilogy, shown at the San Francisco MoMA in 2005, told the story of Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House in San Jose, California. The widowed heiress to the Winchester fortune built a mansion full of mazes and dead-end staircases in order to protect herself from ghosts haunting her."(widewalls.ch )

 On July 22, 2007, Blake's body was found by a fisherman in the waters off Sea Girt, New Jersey. Blake's cause of death was presumed to be suicide by drowning.

Serge Spitzer - Art Installation

Serge Spitzer (1951 – 2012) Romanian-born American artist, known for his site-specific installations, sculpture, photographs and video.
Spitzer's work was exhibited internationally in numerous museums and art institutions.
"Serge Spitzer, a Romanian-born New York-based artist known for his labyrinths of installations that explore the ways in which the passage of time influences public space and, subsequently, shared reality and collective memory, has passed away at the age of sixty-one. Spitzer also utilizes sculpture, works on paper, photography, and video to reflect on these issues. He has participated in a variety of international exhibitions, notably Documenta and the Venice Biennale, and his work is represented in a number of public and private collections including the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Collection.
Some significant works include his installation at the Palais de Tokyo, originally made for the 1997 Biennial of Lyon, which included nearly 2300 feet of plastic tubes that wrapped through the space, soaring into the air and across the ceiling, sliding about corners and over the floor. Here, the artist aimed to reflect a system of tubes that were installed in Paris prior to telephones as a way to send messages quickly from one end of the city to the other. Said Spitzer: “The message of the work is to create something which is a question to itself. You build structures, which seem to be very clear in their functions. But as you realize the work, you discover the irrationalities in the system. The narrative is about reality. You think the piece is about itself but it’s actually about the world around it, about the people, architecture, and about the structure.”
His 2010 installation at the Mayor Synagogue in Majorca was similarly monumental; the artist laid four tons of green and blue marbles over the former main hall of the building. The color and brightness of the marbles changed with various shades of natural daylight, which as the artist, noted in a New York Times article, symbolized the splintered qualities of life and time, which betrayed the temple’s complexity as both a contemporary and historical entity. “I tried to make sure that the work will force a blended reading of reality at all levels,” said Spitzer, “confronting and melting issues in an attempt to succeed alchemy.”(artforum.com)