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Email PageDirected Dreaming
March 4, 2006- April 8, 2006
Reception: March 4, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
Postmasters Gallery
459 W 19th StPostmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Directed Dreaming, the third New York solo exhibition of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. The show will open on March 4 and will be on view until April 8, 2006. The reception is planned for Saturday, March 4, between 6 and 8pm.
In Directed Dreaming, the McCoys present four new sculptures that use movement to explore anxiety. The title of the exhibit refers to practice of willing oneself to dream about specific situations in order to resolve conflicts in one's waking life. The works in Directed Dreaming fuse cinematic, personal, and historical images to become visual records of those conflicts, with the question of resolution left open to the viewer.
The McCoys' sculptures are fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and moving sculptural elements. Camera views are sequenced to create live cinematic events. By exposing the image making apparatus along with the projected results, the work explores both time-based and physical reality.
The two major sculptures in this show expand on the McCoys' 2004 installation Our Second Date by further exploring the artists personal history, fantasies, and memories. Second Date incorporated miniature models of Jennifer and Kevin intercut with views of a meticulously crafted miniature scene from Godard's Weekend. The works in Directed Dreaming splinter the couple's shared autobiography.
In Double Fantasy II (sex), the McCoys represent themselves as nine year olds, drawing on a child's scant sexual understanding to generate fantasies of their adult selves. With this technique they each reach back to a time when their ideas about love and sex were created from an amalgam of observations from television, popular culture and playground gossip that was hopelessly far from reality. In that these sources provide only the broadest of gestures, Double Fantasy II is an autobiographical take on the importance of genre. Formally, the work is a two-sided sculpture containing miniature film sets that fragment and isolate bodies at once fetishized and romanticized. The images captured by the tiny cameras cut together quickly to form a stream of consciousness meditation on the elusive subject of nascent sexuality and childhood imagination.
In Dream Sequence, the McCoys examine how sleep becomes a filter through which objective reality becomes fantasy . The work consists of a two-sided, 3 feet in diameter revolving circle, each side corresponding to the dream world of one of the artists. Using an obsolete trick of early cinema, a partially reflective mirror superimposes the sleeping artists against mutating landscapes. The resulting double projection physicalizes the dream worlds of each artist's psyche. Kevin sees a helicopter unloading soldiers in a bleak landscape. Jennifer dreams of floods that segue into suburban resort swimming pools. The artists abandon the cinematic idea of editing with its jarring ruptures and discontinuities and instead set in motion a fluid self-sustaining world in front of the camera and in front of the viewer.
Included in the show are two wall mounted sculptures from the Clouds series that explore the vocabulary of a unending one shot film. In Clouds 9 and Clouds 10, cameras are trained on moving cloud formations to create suggestions of unknowable and yet moving and possibly ominous events.
Since their last exhibition at Postmasters in 2004, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy were included in numerous exhibitions including SITE Santa Fe's Fifth Biennial Exhibition Our Grotesque, curated by Robert Storr, Zones de Confluences, an exhibition at Villette Numerique in Paris curated by Benjamin Weil , and CUT, Film as Art Object in Contemporary Video, curated By Stefano Basilico for Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami and Milwaukee Art Museum. Most recently their work was shown in Night Sites at Kunstverein Hannover in Germany and at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Later in 2006 they will have solo exhibitions at Edith Russ Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg Germany and at newly opened galleries of National Film Theatre (British Film Institute) in London.
Art Reviews of Directed Dreaming
| Village Voice March 23, 2006 | Jerry Saltz | "Before I saw "Directed Dreaming," Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's current show, I would have said they could have been in the Whitney Biennial. I'm still a fan, but this exhibition finds them in an iffy transition, headed away from strength and enmeshed in weakness...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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