Film & Video (Film & Video)

Three hours west of New York City is the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The story of this eastern ghost town’s demise has become legend: in 1962 burning trash ignited a vein of anthracite coal, starting an underground fire that continues to burn today, forcing the town’s depopulation. Centralia has since become a pilgrimage site; or rather a mile-long stretch of state route 61 outside of the town that sits abandoned, its surface buckled and cracked by the underground fire.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017. The video is a shot-for-shot remake of the film “The Perfect Human” by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (1967). The original is narrated in an anthropological manner, or as if listening to a guide at a zoo, but Da Corte’s version is stranger and more philosophical.

Installation (Installation)

Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Sideways Time by Olivia Erlanger is the result of the artist’s interest in networks, seen and unseen, financial and ecological, the collapse of which has resulted in the fracturing of a middle class American identity. Consumption and the construction of value are a frequent concern of her sculptures that explore the structural friction between a public and private. Erlanger looks to the architecture that connects these systems for inspiration and in this sense, the language of scaffoldings, foundations and facades that percolate throughout her work.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel. In the video, a fallen parachutist hangs tangled by his own lines, suspended between two electrical towers in a surreally desolate landscape of overgrown fields in the Jordan Valley of Israel. A group of over a hundred men and women approach the towers, working with almost mechanic efficiency to free the parachutist from the power lines overhead.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Like several of Mast’s works, B!RDBRA!N (Addendum) is the result of the accumulation of details from the various chapters and formats of an evolving project. The work is comprised by a sculptural set, a text piece that originates from an instructional score, and footage filmed during rehearsals for B!RDBRA!N , a play that was first performed in theaters in Los Angeles. Originally conceived of as a live response to the legacy of the historical French artist Guy de Cointet, Mast set out to investigate and interrogate Cointet’s work while incorporating the true story of Alex, an African Gray parrot who was the subject of a thirty-year avian language experiment.