Antimatter 2009

Media Installations

October 9 to 17, 2009

in the main Deluge gallery

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager | 2008

A collaboration between Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager, the title of this piece is taken from Aristophanes’ play The Birds. In the 4th Century BC, the notion of utopia was already in play—and already in doubt. The film’s narrative encompasses a family’s move to a contemporary commune. Although these “intentional communities” are usually progressive in outlook, they are in other ways disturbingly like gated ones. The central character, after years of fantasizing about the ideal way to raise her child, with fixed, romantic notions of the “best” way to live, is confronted by her own intolerance and inability to integrate into the community.

Cloud Cuckoo Land explores the limits of the utopian ideal of a Lacanian, pre-mirror identity—where a fluidity of boundaries proposes a “You” that cannot easily be distinguished from an “I.” The prescribed boundary between art space and cinema space functions as a model of the larger issue whereby artificial and arbitrary boundaries are used to define conventions of personal and societal comfort and safety.

Erik Moskowitz utilizes the relationship between cinema space and gallery space as a point of departure for gallery works and films. His work has been shown at Goethe Institute, Mumbai; Carnegie Melon University, PA; Momenta Art; Sara Meltzer Gallery, Freight and Volume Gallery, Holiday, NYC; Impakt Festival and Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen.

Amanda Trager explores narrative in different visual media, including painting, sculpture, video and installation. Her work has been shown at The Brooklyn Museum; The Brooklyn Academy of Music; Momenta Art; Feature Gallery; K.S. Art, White Box Gallery, NYC; The Prague Contemporary Art Festival.

in the Deluge entrance foyer

KHAN

Daniel Martinico | 2008

A single channel video installation that appropriates and reworks William Shatner’s iconic scream from Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. Martinico’s KHAN playfully transforms a four second clip into an oscillating series of hypnotic loops, constructing an extended and tensely focused meditation on filmic performance and digital gesture.

Daniel Martinico is an artist and filmmaker living in Los Angeles, CA. His videos have exhibited widely, including at venues such as Machine Project, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, Art in General (New York), VideoEx (Switzerland), Vidarte (Mexico City), and the Rotterdam and Oberhausen International Film Festivals, among many others. He currently serves as visiting faculty in the Communication Department at the University of California, San Diego.

at UVic Visual Arts Building

Circadia

Performative documents shaped by fractured time and circumstance disorder notions of “reality.”

Waterish | Zeljko Jancic Zec | 2007

The documentation of Zec’s eponymous live-performance in an abandoned building, Waterish tells the story of a traveller in a foreign city. The scene leads into an unoccupied house: a squat, which he has chosen as a refuge.

No One Will Ever Love You Until You Love Yourself – After Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde | Saskia Takens-Milne | 2008

The quasi psychology of daytime talk shows is married to a reenactment of an unlikely romantic moment in the movie Bonnie & Clyde to examine modes of loving and being loved.

Circadia | A.D. Christie, E. Hearte & N. Collins | 2009

Circadia considers the possibility of walking through waking life asleep; exploring the effects of chronic fatigue caused by disrupted circadian rhythms. It also considers the notion of sleeping wakefulness—making one’s way through waking life while oblivious to the world around us.