Mori is fascinated by the way contemporary Japanese society balances technology, fantasy, and humanity. With an affectionate perspective on her native country, she explores the way fantasy and reality overlap in contemporary Japanese consciousness. Hers is a world where cartoon characters step out of comic books to stalk the real streets and real people withdraw from their grim routine to lose themselves in cartoon fantasies.

Play With Me (1994)

Mariko stands outside a busy Tokyo video store, dressed in form-fitting plastic armor and a cascading turquoise Barbie wig. She looks like a cross between a samurai waif and a robotic streetwalker who may have materialized from the video game beside her.

Tea Ceremony III (1995)

In this piece Mariko is an interplanetary geisha, dispensing tea to businessmen. Her ”office lady” uniform is regulation black, but her tight-fitting silver cap has pointy Martian ears.

Empty Dream (1995)

Mori digitally inserts herself four times into a photograph of Ocean Dome – the largest indoor theme park in the world, including an artificial beach, waves and all. Posing among happy Japanese bathers, Mori is costumed as a coy mermaid.  Hybrid creature, hybrid world; made for each other.

Birth of A Star (1996)

‘Birth of a Star”,  named for a television talent show, she is the demonic punk incarnation of the look-alike, sound-alike ingenue singers who are Japan’s premier teeny-bop idols.

Miko no Inori / The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer (1996)

In the video, which plays simultaneously on five small screens, Mori looks coquettishly extraterrestrial. With silver hair and menthol-blue eyes, she rotates and massages a glass globe in her hands as if conjuring the future. Outfitted entirely in white, the artist takes on the role of ‘alien’ (much like the being depicted in Last Departure) erotically caressing a crystal ball in her hands. All the while, Mariko voice can be heard singing an evocative ballad in her native tongue.

 Watch an excerpt of the video

Last Departure (1996)

Mariko assumes the same persona but is shown full length and in triplicate, enshrined inside a fabulous spaceship (actually a digitally morphed image of Osaka’s hypermodern Kansai airport). There’s an iconic cast to this triad: the figures suggest Buddhist Barbarellas.  They hold a glass sphere in their hands, much like a crystal ball used by mystics for telling the future – perhaps they have come to show us our destiny. The crystal ball also alludes to the 1980 novel Nantonaku Kurisutoru (Somehow, Crystal), by Yasuo Tanaka that describes the lives of fashion obsessed young women much like the young ‘cyborgs’ who patrol the streets of the Yamanote district in Tokyo.

 3-D video Nirvana (1996-97)

The title refers to the blissful emptiness that is the goal of Buddhist spiritual practice — Ms. Mori appears as the popular deity Kichijoten, in a peach-colored kimono and floating over a Dead Sea landscape tinted an acidic orange-pink. She executes a sequence of ritual gestures, accompanied by a band of cartoon musicians who zoom out toward the viewer before the whole scene dissolves into galactic mist.

Pure Land, from the Esoteric Cosmos series (1996–1997)

In order to participate in the aptly named experience, Nirvana, the viewer is led in to a dark room and asked to don 3D glasses before the film begins. The artist appears as a dancing Shaman dressed in a traditional ornate kimono and floating on a lotus flower. The Shaman is surrounded by pastel coloured elves called tunes, which each play a different Japanese musical instrument. Mariko hums and sings Japanese pop songs through a fuzzy echo chamber and the audience is treated to burst of cool, scented air on their faces. A crystal ball, much like the one featured in previous works, floats out of the sky and into the Shaman’s delicate hands.  The backdrop to Nirvana is a breath-taking view of the Dead Sea at dawn – empty yet pure.

Kumano (1997-1998)

Ms. Mori’s blend of eclectic religious symbolism, cyber technology and pop culture is well informed on all three fronts. And when she turns her attention to Japanese spirituality, as she does in the recent two-part ”Kumano,” the results are even more complex and erudite.

The work entitled Kumano is both a photograph and a film. The title refers to a Pacific peninsula in the south of Japan’s main island, a region of breathtaking natural beauty saturated in religious myth. It is the site of an important Buddhist pilgrimage circuit; legendarily Buddhist saints departed in boats from its shores in search of the Pure Land paradise. Also here are some of the country’s highest waterfalls, many of them worshiped as Shinto gods. The sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom the imperial family descends, has her shrine at nearby Ise.

In the ”Kumano” photo-mural, a purifying waterfall streams down through a grove of cedar trees; a high-tech forest shrine hovers like an apparition, as does Ms. Mori herself in the guise of the sun goddess with her symbolic mirror.

In the video, the image of the goddess flitting like a ray of light among the trees alternates with a scene of Ms. Mori performing the tea ceremony, whose elaborate etiquette she learned as a child. She gives it an unconventional tweak here by including an ancient bronze Chinese vessel among the utensils she uses, yet another indication of the hybrid, pan-Asian nature of much of her recent work.

Dream Temple (1997)

 Pratibimba (1998)

Mariko is dressed as Past, Present and Future (the three members of the Pratibimba triptych) performing Shinto rituals and running through the woods of the Wakayama Prefecture. The whole experience is made all the more enigmatic and enchanting due to the pretty, lilting songs the artist sings as she summons her audience toward the digital representation of the Dream Temple in the background.

WAVE UFO (1999)

Primal Rhythms 2007

Primal Rhythms is sponsored by  the FAOU foundation, a  nonprofit that Mori established in 2010. This project  focuses on uniting technology with ancient forces to create a harmonious, primal work on an island far from civilization.

The foundation’s mission is to explore nature and promote ecology through art. Primal Rhythms, involves a Plexiglas column, and the intimate engagement of a secluded community on the Japanese island of Miyako, part of the okinawa Prefecture. The end product will consist of the three-meter-high sun Pillar and the Moon Stone, a floating LED-equipped sphere, three meters in diameter. The pillar will jut up from a rock cluster in the island’s seven Light Bay from which it will cast a shadow over the water toward the shore that at the winter solstice will intersect with the Moon stone, anchored in the bay and changing color according to the phase of the moon and the tide. Once this Asian project is completed, Mori plans to bring site-specific works tailored to local cultures to five additional continents, beginning with South America.

Before officially beginning her work on Primal Rhythms, in 2007, Mori visited a number of sacred sites around the world and was especially intrigued by dwellings from the Jomon period in Japan—roughly 14,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.—which were associated with sculptural forms that later influenced her designs. “Two objects were always found in a particular area,” she says, “a round stone and a kind of small standing stone. The pair seems to me to be a symbol of regeneration, or a wish for help in harvest, or related to worship of the nature god. It’s probably a primitive stage of shintoism.”

Seven Light Bay will incorporate the Sun Pillar and Moon Stone. The pillar will be erected this month atop two pyramidal rocks in the bay. Originally, the plan was to carry it there in a large boat, but it was feared that the area’s precious coral would be harmed.

“Instead of placing this work in the city, I wanted to place it in the most rich nature, so that people have to travel to actually get in touch with nature and to understand that you are also the nature as well,” says Mori, who spends most of her time in New York. “I like these very ambitious projects—it’s my soul work—but my life work is to interact with the people in the city.”

Anton Ginzburg uses an array of historical and cultural references as starting points for his investigations of art’s capacity to penetrate layers of the past. He constructs lines of memory and imagination, whether collective or individual, and traces them to points of intersection. The last room will contain Hyperborea, a video installation that will document the journey attempting to locate Hyperborea according to its descriptions in literature, newspaper articles and mythology. The installation takes the viewer from the primordial, virgin forest of Oregon, to St. Petersburg and its eroding palaces and haunted natural history museum, and finally to the ruins of the Gulag prisons and archeological sites on the White Sea. Present throughout the installation is a cloud of red smoke that functions both as a metaphor for the exalted self and an expression of the collective unconscious.

Watch Video at www.antonginzburg.com/video-work

The body of work began with the artist’s observation that mythological patterns were undeniably woven into the fabric of everyday reality – specifically in the tension formed between the actual and the potential – and was expanded by the concept of Hyperborea, a mythical region that has been recently claimed to be discovered on the White Sea in northern Russia. Hyperborea was originally described by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus as the land of the Golden Age, and was thought to be a place of pure bliss, perpetual sunlight and eternal springtime. It has been an inspiration for early modernist thinkers such as Nietzsche and Madame Blavatskaya, while acting as a central theme to the early twentieth century St. Petersburg poetic tradition of Acmeism — dealing with the “golden age of man.” Hyperborea continues to excite imagination of global media as the supposed birth-place of numerous cultures and nations.

Video artist, performance artist, composer and visionary: Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century. Tate Liverpool, in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) present the first major retrospective since the artist’s death, and the first exhibition of Paik’s work in the UK since 1988.

The exhibition celebrates Paik as the inventor of media art. At a time when television was still a novelty, Paik foresaw the future popularity of this new and exciting medium. Thought provoking works like TV Buddha (1989) explore the clashing cultures of east and west, old and new, while Video Fish (1979 – 1992) considers nature versus the man made featuring both television sets and live fish in aquariums.

With artworks ranging from scores of early music performances and Paik’s involvement in the Fluxus movement to TV works, impressive robot sculptures and large-scale video installations; Tate Liverpool’s exhibition will both entertain and inspire.

The exhibition continues at FACT. Focusing on Paik’s innovative use of creative technology, FACT will showcase the major laser installation Laser Cone (1998) for the first time in the UK, along with sixteen single channel video works, including Global Groove 1973 and groundbreaking satellite videos Good Morning Mr Orwell 1984 and Bye Bye Kipling 1986

In recent years, television’s reality shows and talent competitions have offered people a conflicted chance at fame, while various kinds of Web-based social media have pioneered new forms of communication that people increasingly use to perform their private lives as public theater. During the same period, governments worldwide have asserted vast new powers of surveillance, placing unwitting “participants” on an entirely different kind of stage.

Against this backdrop, The Talent Show examines a range of relationships between artists, audiences, and participants that model the competing desires for notoriety and privacy marking our present moment. Ranging from seemingly benevolent partnerships to those that appear to exploit their subjects, many of the works in the exhibition animate the tensions between exhibitionism and voyeurism, and raise challenging ethical questions around issues of authorship, power, and control.

Selected Artists:

1. Andy Warhol

“Robin”
1965. 16mm film, black and white

“Screen Tests,” this four-minute 16-millimeter film portraits of famous, semi-famous and unknown subjects. Projected wall-size here is the nearly static image of a young woman named Robin, who sat for her film portrait in 1965. She was not a celebrity, but there seems no reason to think she could not have been another superstar had she been more self-assertive.

2. Piero Manzoni

Base magica – Scultura vivente
1961. wood 60 x 79.5 x 79.5 cm

A pedestal called “Magic Base — Living Sculpture” (1961) by Piero Manzoni invites people to step up on it and exhibit themselves as works of live art.

3. Chris Burden

Wiretap
1972. Mixed media installation

Chris Burden’s performances from the early ’70s did much to shift attention from things artists make to the artist as a quasi celebrity. Here three of Mr. Burden’s actions are memorialized in reliquarylike plexiglass boxes, with mementos resting on purple velvet cushions. One offers only a printed card stating: “I disappeared for three days without prior notice to anyone. On these three days my whereabouts were unknown.” I want to say as I write this, “Well, no one knows where I am right now,” but then I am not the object of a personality cult.

4. Adrian Piper

Context #7
1970. Mixed media installation

Adrian Piper’s contribution to “Information,” the influential exhibition of Conceptual art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, was a binder full of blank pages on which visitors were asked to write or draw whatever they liked. A selection of those sheets is displayed around the walls of one gallery. They included political commentaries, feeble japes like “You are all under arrest” and crude cartoons. The most incisive is a drawing of two people, one saying to the other, “You know Clyde, this exhibit’s better when you’re stoned.”

5. Amie Siegel

My Way 2
2009. Video (color, sound); 12 minutes

Compilation of  YouTube clips of girls and young women singing “Gotta Go My Own Way” from the movie “High School Musical 2,” on the one hand, and men singing the Frank Sinatra chestnut “My Way” on the other.

6. Sophie Calle

The Address Book
2009. A portfolio of prints: 28 pages, each with text and photographs

In 1983, Calle produced her most controversial work of art, Address Book. She had found an address book in the street, photocopied it and sent the original back to its owner. She then visited and interviewed the people listed, in order to build up a profile of its owner from their descriptions and anecdotes. The results were published in Liberation. At around the same time Calle herself became the willing subject of such investigations. In 1981 at Calle’s request, her mother hired a private detective to follow her daughter, photograph her in secret and record her every movement. It was, in Calle’s words, an attempt ‘to provide photographic evidence of my own existence’.

Mika Rottenberg’s immersive video installations address issues of gender and labor through outrageous narratives centered around real women (not actors or models) and their bodies. With her new video entitled Squeeze, Rottenberg collapses the humorous and the unsettling to examine global production in a 20-minute narrative that screens on a continuous loop at SFMOMA. Splicing together documentary footage from a rubber plant in India and a lettuce farm in Arizona with her own narrative of women in an absurdist makeup factory, Rottenberg’s surreal video homes in on the social realities of women’s labor.

In the makeup factory the blush source (the blond woman, dressed in an alluring outfit) is literally squeezed by walls for profit. Meanwhile, a nozzle from the wall of bare asses sprays water, and an obese woman spins on a circular floor — all to ensure that the priceless block of lettuce-rubber-blush is made to perfection.

“This piece, which is trying to collapse these geographically distant places into one space, is a natural step for me,” Rottenberg says. “It’s about using your body and being alienated from your body, objectifying your body and using it almost like a factory that can produce stuff. I feel like that’s very feminine. I’m interested in how selling one’s body can be empowering.”

Mika Rottenberg
Still: Squeeze, 2010

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive mediums, live performance, and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past.

Christian Boltanski
Autel de Lycee Chases, 1986-87

From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiraling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.

Joan Jonas
Mirror Piece, 1969

Artists: Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Paul Chan, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Joan Jonas, Sally Mann, Christian Marclay, Susan Philipsz, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner, as Well as Commissioned Performances by Sharon Hayes, Joan Jonas, and Tris Vonna-Michell

Marina Abramovic
Cleaning the Mirror #1, 1995

Faurschou Beijing presents a solo exhibition by the American video artist Tony Oursler, his first exhibition in China.
Since the mid-1970s Oursler has been a pioneer in New Media Art, and today he is one of the very biggest, most experimental and innovative artists working in the field of the video medium. The exhibition will introduce the Chinese public to a survey of projected pieces from the early 90s to the present that will give a strong impression of this great artist’s work.

Unique idiom
Tony Oursler has become well known for his unique video and installation works, which combine spoken text, performance, moving images and sculptural objects. Unlike other video artists Oursler does not only project his works on a uniform surface but projects his video images on to dolls, balls, architecture and other surfaces such as treetops and clouds of steam. It has been said that the artist has freed the video image from the “box.”

The Human Head
In this survey of works from the past two decades the curatorial focus is on the head of the human body. All the works in the show are based on the head and the notion of the head as the permeable center of consciousness. The work addresses the ebb and flow of elements such as light, smoke, thoughts, impulses, language, voice, memory, which interact with this central icon.

The Works
The viewer is greeted by “Doll”, one of Oursler’s first breakthrough projections on rag dolls from the early 90s. The classic figurative sculpture is fused with a projected face, forming a hybrid between art and cinema. The little talking figure tests the viewer’s empathy by challenging his passive role in art viewing.

Entering the exhibition one has to pass through “Cigarettes” a series of oversized, tubular screens with high-definition projection. The effect is that of a smoldering, virtual forest of various Western brands of cigarettes. The viewer’s decision to indulge, or not, in various compulsive activities is called into question. This work also has further philosophical ramifications, including the pros and cons of progress as the columns seem to transform into architecture, or an industrial skyline.

Crash | 1994 | Fabric doll, wire, suitcase, video projection

In another installation, “Eyes”, large blinking eyeballs are floating like independent planets in the universe. With its point of departure in the history of the camera obscura, first mentioned by the Chinese poet and scientist Shen Kuo (1031-1095), this installation points to the eye as an anatomical analogue of our desire for escapism through technology.

Continuing the exploration of technology, media and the viewer’s fantasy, the installation “FX” (the abbreviation for special effects in the movie industry) is a multi-projection of a human head lost in a blaze of flames and explosions. Inspired by blockbuster cinema and terrorist activities, the work begins with an ironic, humorous premise: What would happen if the explosion was extended in time? In this installation something that would take place in a fraction of a second is stretched out in time, and the viewer can enter into a dialogue with an inferno.

Ending the exhibition on a humorous note, Oursler meets the viewer’s basic need for companionship with “Classic”. A head pieced together as a film collage of eyes and a mouth is uttering absurd sentences and statements. It is very amusing and disturbing too – and points to the way we mould technology to our desires, in the tradition of the “smiley face” and the “avatar” – the 3D representation of the interaction between human and machine.

Big Eyes | Video Projection

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
The exhibition takes its title from George Miller’s classic 1956 paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” – an essay about the limits on the capacity of human cognition. Psychological experiments have shown that people have a hard time remembering more than about seven unrelated pieces of really dull data all at once. The point of Miller’s research is that for human beings to remember large quantities of information they have to associate memory fragments with the various data.

Technology and Humanity
Tony Oursler’s video installations are influenced by exactly this: his interest in our information and media society and its effect on mankind. The uncertainty that many people feel in connection with the constantly growing flow of information, the fragmentation of the world and alienation from our own bodies and society is a conspicuous theme in many of his works.

Oursler is fascinated by the enormous potential of new technologies, especially those which, like video and film, can get close to reality. Oursler uses technology to imitate human and emotional features – and by associating speech, moving images and objects Oursler creates video sculptures and installations that exhibit a humanity that can easily engage us.

This visually convincing and humorous way of approaching current important social, psychological and existential subjects has made Tony Oursler one of the most important artists in the world today.

Cell Phones Diagrams Cigarettes Searches and Scratch Cards | 2009 | PVC Tubes and digital projection

Anthony McCall is a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema. He has carved a unique position in contemporary art by bridging the gaps between the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial by means of his extraordinary ‘solid light’ films, which manifest as immersive installations made by drawing in real space with projected light. McCall creates “solid light” works – digital videos of meticulously choreographed intersecting lines and curves which are projected in darkened haze-filled rooms, creating three-dimensional sculptural forms constructed from light. When the viewer moves in and out of the projected light beams, they are forced to reconcile their perceived sense of a three dimensional object in space with the actual reality of the mutable properties of light.

[A solid light film] exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other…every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form. Anthony McCall, 1974

McCall’sHis films and installations from the seventies such as Line Describing a Cone, Long Film for Four Projectors, and Four Projected Movements, represent an extraordinarily corporeal and sensuous meditation on the medium of film and the politics of the audience’s physical and conceptual relationship to it. All of these works took as their starting point the irreducible, necessary conditions of cinema: projected light, and real, three-dimensional space.

Coupling, 2009
video projector, computer, QuickTime Movie file, haze machine
one cycle: 16 minutes in four parts

On 27 March 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location “The Globe
Shrinks”, a new video installation by Barbara Kruger.

“The Globe Shrinks” (2010) is a multiple channel video installation that continues
Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of
declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address,
and the unspoken in every conversation.

Barbara Kruger
still from The Globe Shrinks
dimensions variable
four-screen digital video installation
2010

Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was. At least, that’s the way it looks in “The Globe Shrinks,” an immersive new multichannel video installation that is challenging the presumptions of all who dare to enter the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea.

Balancing self-possession with self-doubt and rage with tenderness, Kruger’s art does exactly what one of her subtitles says: it show us to ourselves. The globe may shrink for those who own it, as another phrase (borrowed from the critical theorist Homi K. Bhaba) puts it, but Kruger’s perfect calibration of life’s crueler ironies performs a kind of miracle, allowing the blind to see all.

This is the third of a series of video works with which Kruger has translated her widely copied graphic designs — superimposing red or white text over cropped images, or enlarging words into slogans the size of buildings — into propulsive action. Some of the text in “The Globe Shrinks” came out of “Between Being and Dying,” her installation last fall at Lever House, where she covered the windows, columns and floor of the lobby in phrases like “A rich man’s jokes are always funny,” speaking truth to the lords of power and ambition who build palaces like, well, Lever House.

www.maryboonegallery.com
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

“Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence” at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art presents the work of a dozen international artists who explore such fundamental mysteries using the substances so often associated with them: light, shadow and atmosphere.

Overall, it’s a relatively tight show — physically involving, emotionally absorbing and conceptually sound. Each artist is represented by a single work, dating from the 1980s to the present, but all have demonstrated over time a broader, deeper engagement with the issues at hand. No artistic integrity was sacrificed in the name of thematic consistency — and that’s one of the show’s most impressive absences.

Oscar Munoz
Alineto (Breath), 2002

The spectacles range in intensity from whispers to roars. One of the quietest works, the Colombian Oscar Munoz’s “Aliento (Breath),” is also one of the most poignant. Five mirrored discs hang at eye level and bear no image but the viewer’s own reflection until breathed upon. Condensation causes another face to emerge, a small photographic portrait of a deceased man or woman, there only briefly, then once again submerged within the disc’s glossy surface. The faces’ anonymity and the brevity of their appearance act as powerful metaphors for our transient condition, our lives as fleeting as a single breath.

Munoz’s delicate act of breathing life into vanished souls competes with the foggy extravaganza of a neighboring installation. Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s “Smoking Bench” blankets you with vaporous plumes when you sit on it. A nearby mirror allows you the pleasure of watching yourself momentarily vanish, a gimmicky but amusing smoke-and-mirrors illusion.

Teresa Margolles
Aire (Air), 2002

Vapors are central to several other works in the show. Five portable humidifiers in Teresa Margolles’ “Aire (Air)” emit gentle streams of air moistened, in part, by water that was used to clean corpses in a Mexican morgue. The notion is stirring, but the piece is otherwise mute.

Rosangela Renno
Experiencing Cinema, 2004

In “Experiencing Cinema,” a better use of atmospherics, Brazilian Rosangela Renno revives an early 19th century phantasmagoria practice of projecting still pictures onto veils of smoke. Photographs, gathered from found family albums, cohere briefly on the smoke screen; then both image and screen dissipate, mortality again provocatively aligned with ephemerality.

The evocative power of shadows and reflections dominates the remaining works. Christian Boltanski’s orbiting dancer, seen in shadow through a partly opened door, is mildly intriguing for its calculated elusiveness. In Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installation, the movement of viewers triggers the brightness of a row of low-hanging incandescent bulbs, creating a play of overlapping shadows on the opposite wall, but the effort amounts to little. Regina Silveira’s perspectively distorted shadow of a reader (in vinyl, adhered to wall and floor) holding an actual book, feels slight, as if it ought to be part of a larger installation.

Jim Campbell
Library, 2004

Jim Campbell layers a photogravure over a grid of programmed LED lights to create an image of shadowy figures moving up and down the steps of the New York Public Library. Human presence appears as shifting, translucent gray washes across the fixed stone edifice, resulting in a lovely meditation on time, endurance and transience.