Cheers, Magda
May 1 - June 12, 2004
JENNIFER and KEVIN McCOY
"Soft Rains"
(an exhibition of miniature movie sets for robotic cinema)
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of "Soft
Rains," the second New York solo exhibition of Jennifer and Kevin
McCoy. The show will open on May 8 and will be on view until June 12,
2004. The reception is planned for Saturday, May 8, between 6 and 8pm.
In this new series of works, the McCoys present electronic
installations that examine narrative spaces. Extending from previous
work of databased television and film material, the artists new work
further explores the idea that thought, experience and memory are
structured through genre and repetition.
Entering the gallery, the viewer sees seven platforms each containing
a tiny fragmentary film set. The platforms each embody images and
sounds from a particular cinematic genre (the eighties slasher, the
fifties melodrama, the sixties art film, etc). The platform/genres
can each stand autonomously or together they produce a cinema-hopping
amalgamation of themes and eras. Over 50 miniature video cameras and
lights are suspended over the sets, creating a new filmic entity
generated live. By exposing the film sets together with their film,
the McCoys expose and yet retain the magic of movie-making. We can
see the working parts of the apparatus, but are still won over by the
whole. The sets themselves are an exploded spatial view of what one
experiences temporally in film. The images are shot by several
cameras simultaneously, each from its own angle, each focused on a
different area of the set, and the multipart compound of images that
these cameras together create is then sent to a computer running
custom software that picks from the range of choices, "editing" it
into the seven movies. The McCoys handle the passage of time by
spreading "actors" and locations out in space to represent different
moments, which are then intercut onscreen to suggest movement in time
and place. Each story is told in six to ten shots.
"A magical shift occurs: the instantaneous translation of a physical
space distributed over a large horizontal field, in which everything
exists simultaneously and three-dimensionally but without movement,
into a flat visual space on a vertical screen, in which nothing has
any physical depth and in which physical simultaneity is converted
into temporal sequence and action…The McCoys' new piece "Soft
Rains," intricate and entertaining, is rooted in the history of film,
which, however, with slice-and-dice aplomb, it chops into a new form:
its cinematic syntax is parsed not by any familiar story-telling
ambition but by the electronic synapses of the computer."
- DAVID FRAENKEL
(from catalog essay for the "Soft Rains" exhibition at Sala Rekalde in Bilbao)
In the rear gallery, the McCoys present "Our Second Date". This
piece extends the form of "Soft Rains" by including the artists
themselves within the constructed narrative. In "Our Second Date",
the couple can be seen watching a movie which is being created
adjacent to them on a rotating set. This piece begins a new cycle of
work which examines the role that media has played in the development
of the artists' relationship.
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Soft Rains" is a project supported by FACT and Creative Capital with
assistance from Eyebeam. It premiered in September 2003 at FACT
Centre, Liverpool, U.K. and toured to Sala Rekalde in Bilbao in
March of 2004.
Since their first exhibition at Postmasters in April 2002, Jennifer
and Kevin McCoy had solo exhibitions at The Butler Art Institute in
Youngstown, Ohio, San Jose University Art Gallery in California, Van
Laere Contemporary Art in Antwerp, and Galerie Guy Bartschi in
Geneva. They participated in the Future Cinema exhibition (2002-2004)
organized by ZKM Center for Media Art in Karlsruhe, Germany and later
traveling to Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Finland and
Intercommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo.
McCoys' works were included in Animations shows at PS 1, New York and
Kunst Werke, Berlin (2002-2003), as well as in recent acquisitions
show at The Metropolitan Museum in New York (2003). Presently their
work is shown in Open House at The Brooklyn Museum in New York.
This July the McCoys will participate in SITE Santa Fe's Fifth
Biennial Exhibition Our Grotesque, curated by Robert Storr. In the
fall of 2004 they will present new works at two shows: at Vilette
Numerique in Paris, in an exhibition Zones de Confluences, curated by
Benjamin Weil , and in Terminal Five exhibition, curated by Rachel
Ward and staged in TWA terminal at JFK Airport in New York .
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Postmasters Gallery, located in Chelsea at 459 West 19th Street
corner of 10th Avenue), is open Tuesday through Saturday 11am to 6 pm.
Please contact Magdalena Sawon with any questions or image requests
http://www.postmastersart.com
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JENNIFER and KEVIN McCOY new show at Postmasters Gallery
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Type: discussion