VertiGhost
2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
12:47 minutes
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes. Hershman Leeson’s project explores the elusive nature of a singular identity, which haunts the characters in Hitchcock’s 1958 film—its most enigmatic representation being the painting of a supposed distant relative of the film’s protagonist Madeleine, around which her character and fate are imagined. In a powerful scene, psychologist and performer Nkechi Emeruwa sits at the Legion of Honor in the present day and recites her relationship with Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Growing up watching them with her mother in Nigeria, Emeruwa admits to watching his films with curiosity about the American mind. Having been raised in a place where she was considered the dominant culture, Emeruwa, a Black woman, says that in the United States that perspective is destabilized as she finds herself experiencing the world through the lens of its dominant culture—a white man. The film is full of complex moments like this one, challenging our common beliefs and provoking our notions.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a celebrated Bay Area artist and filmmaker internationally renowned for her pioneering use of new technologies to explore key social issues. Her prolific body of work spans over four decades: from her early conceptual and performance works where she constructed an ‘official’ civilian record for her alter ego Roberta Breitmore, to her more recent works that intersect with the field of science to explore themes of identity, privacy, surveillance and the complex relationship between humans and technology, and the real and the virtual world. Hershman Leeson also addresses these key themes through her filmmaking, which is highly idiosyncratic and socially engaged. A notable example is her acclaimed documentary !Women Art Revolution , which focuses on the Feminist movement in the USA.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » american video artists, » feminist artists, » artists from the san francisco bay area, » new media art
» see more
© » KADIST
Tammy Rae Carland
2002Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated...
© » KADIST
Felipe Dulzaides
2006I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...
© » KADIST
Sadie Benning
2017In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity...
© » KADIST
Trevor Paglen
2020Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...
Related works featuring themes of: » Color Photography, » Cultural Commentary, » Feminism, » Film/Video, » American
» see more
© » KADIST
Ana Teresa Fernández
2011The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
© » KADIST
Doug Aitken
2009The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
© » KADIST
Walead Beshty
2010Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram...
© » KADIST
Nalini Malani
1996Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Ana Teresa Fernández
2011The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
© » KADIST
Doug Aitken
2009The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
© » KADIST
Rodney Graham
1996Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Tirdad Hashemi
2022This untitled painting by Tirdad Hasemi presents a space that can be thought of as both a prison cell and a house...
© » KADIST
Pratchaya Phinthong
2022Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand)...
© » KADIST
Joshua Serafin
2022Through the language of dance and choreography, Void by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity...
Related works from the » 2010's created around » San Francisco, California
» see more
© » KADIST
Will Rogan
2010MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
© » KADIST
Phillip Maisel
2015While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
© » KADIST
Rodney McMillian
2013In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
© » KADIST
Will Rogan
2014Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
Other works by: » Lynn Hershman Leeson
» see more
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2016Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2007Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson Women Artists in KADIST’s and Videobrasil’s Collections An Online Video Exhibition streaming at videobrasil.online from September 27–November 28, 2021 From early on, the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson (1941, Cleveland, USA) anticipated the impact of technological developments on our lives and has explored how women’s identities are coded and decoded by them...
© » KADIST
Diana Thater
2005In Perpetual Motion (2005) the seemingly erratic flight of the bright orange Monarch butterfly—filmed in its winter habitat of Michoacán, Mexico—is intensified by the artist’s editing in which frames are randomly dropped and the film is sped up...
© » KADIST
Lola Gonzàlez
2015In Summer Camp , Lola Gonzàlez filmed a group of friends at the home of her parents in the department of Charente (France) in the process of transforming the house into a training camp...