Exhibition Info
May 3-19, 2015 and June 22-July 7, 2015
Weekdays & Weekends: 10am-6pm
Jennifer and Kevin McCoymultimedia artworks examine the genres and conventions of filmmaking, memory and language. They are well known for constructing subjective databases of narrative material and making fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and moving sculptural elements to create live cinematic events. Artists who have always engaged with the tools and psychological conditions created by technology, the McCoy’s have now turned their attention to the companies that generate these tools. Their recent projects trace the threads that bind the American frontier to the adoption of extreme Libertarian ideology by current scions of technology in places like Silicon Valley. Using video and sculptural dioramas, the McCoy’s projects create speculative fictional spaces that extend from current sites. They begin from the natural collages that form as modern structures supplant industrial, agrarian, and natural sites.
The first video of the trilogy, Silicon Flats reveals through overlapping imagery Silicon Valley’s natural environment and the architecture of its suburban technology headquarter buildings. Discovery of Freedom is also collaged landscape with images from DeSmet, SD, a winter portrait of the site of the famous Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead. In this work the stark landscape of Wilder’s youth is juxtaposed with the architecture of the rural industrial present in the town near the homestead site. The McCoy’s were first drawn to the site during a summer cross country driving trip which began their research into America’s “frontier” ideology. Research into the site revealed that the Ingalls family was granted the homestead land by the United States government. The conditions were harsh and the family moved after a short time. Later, Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane co-wrote the famous Little House on the Prairie series of books, based on the family’s time at the homestead. A journalist and pundit of her time, Wilder’s daughter coined the term “libertarian” (along with the more famous Ayn Rand). Rose Wilder Lane used the proceeds from the considerable sales of her mother’s story to fund the first libertarian party candidate.
In Mussafah, the camera takes a journey through the manufacturing zone of Abu Dhabi. Far from the glittering skyscrapers and beaches, Mussafah is the place in Abu Dhabi to fix motors, to bend aluminum, to produce tangible material goods. It is the “back of the shop”, literally the place where the advertising signs are printed. Using a slow tracking shot, the McCoy’s video allows the eye to take in the details of this environment with all its complexity. It is a work place, yet there are clothes hanging on clotheslines and chickens in the street. It is Arab, yet multinational logos and English signs abound. Its streets are largely devoid of people, yet it operates on 24 hour work shifts. In previous work, the McCoy’s fabricated post-apocalyptic miniatures to shoot tracking shots of blown out malls. As they have found in Abu Dhabi, the need to create these landscapes from the imagination was unnecessary.
The McCoys’ work have been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally – their exhibitions include the Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank in London, Hanover Kunstverein, The Beall Center in Irvine, CA, pkm Gallery in Beijing, The San Jose Museum of Art, Palazzo della Papesse, The Addison Museum of American Art, The Nevada Museum of Art, and Artists Space in New York. Their work can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Speed Museum. They received a Creative Capital award in 2003, the Wired Rave Award for Art in 2005, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. Their work is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York and Johansson Projects in Oakland.
For more information, visit the McCoy’s website.
Silicon Flats, 2014
9:00 min.
May 3-6, 9-11
Mussafah,, 2011
49:00 min.
May 13-19
Discovery of Freedom, 2014
HD video, 15:22 min.
June 22 – July 7