An Evening with James Fotopoulos

Ocularis at Galapagos Art Space
70 North 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Contact:
Contact Thomas Beard for further information ::
[email protected] 646.420.0359

An Evening with James Fotopoulos
Sunday, September 25 at 7 PM
Ticket Price $6

Ocularis is proud to present a show of recent video by Chicago-based media artist James Fotopoulos. Included in the program are works that highlight his technical virtuosity and range of formal concerns, from the pulsing abstraction in film/video hybrid The Lighthouse to the many-layered tableaux of Spine Face, which fuses drawing, sculpture, and animation into a complex amalgam of zoo animals, guns, masks, Biblical scripture, and his usual share
of ontological anxiety. The screening will also feature a single channel excerpt from his installation The Mirror Mask. Commissioned for the recent Contour Biennial in Belgium, The Mirror Mask takes Fotopoulos' longstanding practice of rendering organic forms in synthetic modes to its logical conclusion, with content that resembles everything from Egyptian hieroglyphs to digitized versions of Viennese Aktionism.

"Considering his craft prowess, esthetic ambition, and obsessive productivity, it is by no means outrageous or presumptive to cite Fotopoulos as a kind of post-video answer to Stan Brakhage: a lone male explorer, delving far into the expressive possibilities of form through the interface of audio-visual technology. But whereas Brakhage’s machine-age legacy
stresses the carefully controlled purity of an expressly filmic vision, Fotopoulos embraces the chaotic impurities of continuously-evolving electronic media. Just as Brakhage’s camera-vision emerged in the age of cinephilia, Fotopoulos’ digital drones and hypnotic pixels parallel our own daily immersion in computery realms." - Ed Halter, "James Fotopoulos"

To be screened: The Lighthouse, 2004, 10 min, video; The Watchtower, 2003, 6 min, video; Spine Face, 2005, 41 min, video; The Mirror Mask (excerpt) 2005, 14 min, video; 30.40, 2005, 2 min, video

All works are New York premieres.

James Fotopoulos will introduce the program and take questions afterwards.

Total Running Time: 73 min

About James Fotopoulos

The work of James Fotopoulos has shown internationally at many festivals and sites including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Underground Film Festival, Sundance Channel, Walker Art Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum, among others. In 2002 he had a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives and was exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2005 he received the Creative Capital Grant for his video on the life of Richard Nixon and has a book of drawings, The Lime Book, soon to be published. Most recently he has completed an installation for the 2005 Contour Biennial for Video Art.

About Ocularis

Ocularis is a 501©3 not-for-profit organization that provides a forum for the exhibition of independent, experimental and documentary film/video and new media, as well as international and repertory cinema. Ocularis was established in 1996 as a rooftop film series catering to local audiences in North Brooklyn. Since then, Ocularis has evolved into a weekly cinema, a producer of collaborative film/video work and a summer open-air screening series.

Ocularis screens weekly at
Galapagos Art and Performance Space.
70 North 6th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://www.ocularis.net
tel/fax: 718.388.8713