Video in America

Video in America

at Everson Museum of Art


March 1, 2019 – March 31, 2019

The Everson’s commitment to video art began in 1971 with the launch of one of the first exhibition programs in the country to feature the work of artists working with video technology. Today, the Everson’s historic video art archive contains over 400 video tapes, 130 of which were conserved and digitized in the last few years.

Video in America features recently digitized works paired with contemporary videos in order to draw connections between video art being produced today and the influential, early work in the Everson’s archive. The videos in this yearlong exhibition will change each month, focusing on a different region of the country and providing a snapshot of the ways in which artists are using video today.

Atlanta Contemporary’s contribution to this exhibition is a long overdue pairing of two old friends. JD Walsh moved to Atlanta at 22 to teach at the Atlanta College of Art. The chair of the video department at the time was Sara Hornbacher, a boundary-buster in the realm of site-specific, environmental video installations. Years earlier when Hornbacher was a student at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York—Buffalo, she had studied with so many of the first pioneers in video art: Paul Sharits, Woody Vasulka, Gerald O’Grady, Hollis Frampton, and Tony Conrad. For many years all roads on the avant-garde superhighway ping ponged around Upstate. Hornbacher first visited the innovative electronic tools at the esteemed Experimental Television Center (Owego, New York) in 1976 and she returned frequently until the center closed in 2011. With a career spanning four decades, Hornbacher has utilized forever-evolving machines to explore her deep fascination with light and surface. Found and filmed footage is manipulated to tease our conventions of time and space. Nothing sits still, the tempo of sporadically overlaid images float towards us gradually or rapidly flicker like magic bullets. Like a be-bop improviser, her spellbinding videos are intuitive, the screen dancing to its own peak impulses free from any rational or technical constraints.

JD Walsh also keeps us between moments when we stop existing in reality and when fantasy begins. Untitled RPG, 2008, utilizes the language of game-theory, especially Role Playing Games (RPGs). The piece brings together a moving picture within a moving picture, stitching seemingly mundane genuine moments at the beach or having picnic on the grass, birds balancing atop a tree or the M1 bus arriving to the Kmart Pharmacy in NoHo. There is an ambivalence, a blankness to reality, each time we go IRL conjures up associations with a lo-fi, open-ended fictional world. Walsh depicts New York City, only five years in the future, as a desert scape, with a stretched white limo parked between an Ikea superstore and Washington Monument. It is unclear as to our avatar’s mission as we stutter around an assortment of random, disconnected imagery. In Walsh’s dream other people are painfully unnecessary, we solely rely on bland big box chains, conveniences that help us cope with the pressures of daily life.

Bios

Sara Hornbacher

Sara Hornbacher is a pioneer of video art and digital imaging. After receiving an undergraduate degree in Fine Art, she completed at Masters Degree at SUNY/Buffalo where she studied video with the Vasulkas at the Center for Media Study. Hornbacher was Guest editor of the first CAA ART JOURNAL issue on Video in 1985. She completed her first residency at the Experimental TV Center in 1976 and annual residencies at ETC continued through 2011. Her annual Signal Culture residencies began in 2014 and continue in 2018 The artist’s single- channel video works and multi-media installations have been exhibited throughout the USA, Europe, Australia, and Japan, including MOMA, PS1, The Whitney Museum Art, The Kitchen, Postmasters and New Math Gallery, The Bronx Museum for the Arts in NY, MOCA/GA, the Fay Gold Gallery, and The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center where she mounted a large-scale interactive installation environment, “A Thousand Plateaus” in 2001. She is currently a Studio Artist at The Contemporary. Hornbacher has received numerous grants and awards including a 1985 Media Production grant from NYSCA and The Mayor’s Fellowship in the Arts from the Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Arts in 2000. ”Transfigured Time”, a 40’ photomural composed of 128 portraits of Atlantans was commissioned for Course E at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. In 2012, she became a Legacy Artist at The Burch eld Penney Art Center in Buff alo, NY and her video work is being archived at the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. In 2020, she received a $5000 “Artist’s Relief” Grant.
Hornbacher’s work, “Precession of the Simulacra” a five-monitor installation was shown at MOMA/PS! In J in a year-long exhibition, January 2018. In March 2019, she represented Atlanta with a projection of Numerical Studies III at the Everson Museum’s year-long exhibition, “Video in America”. In 2020, her work, “Precession of the Simulacra” was selected by curator, Laura McGough for Hallwall’s “Signal, Skin, Pixel, Camera”, an online series which ended on July 31 Her installation “Precession: Flag Finale” is currently on exhibit.at OCA’s t Gallery 72, through the Inauguration on January 20, 2021.

JD Walsh

JD Walsh is a multimedia artist. He has exhibited at galleries internationally including Halsey McKay, Cleopatra’s, 106 Green, Brennan & Griffin, and Nicole Klagsbrun in New York, Galerie Steinek in Vienna, and Cooper Cole in Toronto. In 2012 his public art installation “Ensemble for Mixed Use” was commissioned by the City of Toronto for the 2012 Nuit Blanche festival. His work has been written about in Artforum, Flash Art, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. His ongoing music project Shy Layers has garnered critical acclaim and was listed as one of the top 20 electronic albums of 2016 by Pitchfork.

Location

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison Street
Syracuse, New York 13202
Tel (315) 474 6064
everson@everson.org
Off-site event

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