Wednesday, October 28 6:30 pm
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Fl., New York, NY 10011
EAI presents a seasonally themed free screening of macabre media that digs through the tropes of horror cinema. Although narrative, genre, and lurid popular entertainment may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for artists media, the grotesqueand specifically its situation within the televisual dimensionhas crept into approaches as varied as the diary video, direct-camera performance, film/video hybrid, and datamosh. By dissecting and reanimating the themes and scenarios of horror film and television, the artists offer a subversive post-mortem on the syntax and politics of the genre while offering a glimpse of the unknown, mysterious, and shocking that lurk at the video signals outer limits.
Monster Voice, the first of several direct-camera performances by Cynthia Maughan included in the program, features the artist adopting a faux-ghastly tone of a grindhouse movie trailer announcer to describe a stereotypical woman-in-peril plot. In The Scary Movie, Peggy Ahwesh directs two young girls through a series of familiar horror film gestures set to a madcap audio assemblage of anarchic sounds and screams. Michael Smith’s sitcom-style Secret Horror finds average guy Mike ironing his pants in front of the TV before a gang of spooks arrive to whisk him away on a comic nightmare. Cecelia Condit plunges the viewer into a suburban nightmare in the uncompromisingly grisly yet eerily sing-songy Beneath the Skin, a tale of violence between partners that freely mixes processed film and video and found footage to invoke crossed identities and subterranean states. Takeshi Murata exhumes a scene from Mario Bavas quintessential Italian gothic horror film Black Sunday to send star Barbara Steele reeling through a soupy digital mist. Catholic ritual, sexuality, and alienation course through Tony Oursler’s vampire video Sucker. And George Kuchar’s 1987 video diary The Creeping Crimson offers a closing meditation on the season and mortality; as he writes, It is fall and Halloween, and mom is in the hospital. The leaves are red and the mood is blue, but life drips on.
ADMISSION IS FREE! 😀 More information at: http://www.eai.org