While the epidemic has not yet dissipated, the Yuz Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) launched a new video section "Art Presence". The series will join forces with more than a dozen participating artists from California in the current exhibition "Making It: The Workplace of Art and Film" to invite visitors on a mysterious behind-the-scenes studio tour.
Every one to two weeks of the "Art In the Presence" series, the series goes deep into the studios of more than a dozen participating artists and engages in face-to-face dialogue with the artists. Artists appearing include: Julie Orser, Joe Sola, Dashiell Manley, Piero Golia, Alex Prager, Bruce Yonemoto, Sayre Gomez, Brian Bress, Kathryn Andrews et al.
Judy's Nightmare, Julie Orser, animated video with sound, 2', 2014
Generally speaking, works of art in the narrow sense are only present in public spaces such as art museums and galleries, and the audience can only have a direct relationship with the work in a specific field. The "Art Presence" series of the Yuz Museum of Art breaks this physical space restriction with a virtual presentation, and the concept of "art" also expands from the work itself to the individual artist and the creative process. When the viewer watches, the work, the artist, the creative process and the audience are present at the same time, and the way the artwork appears gives the audience a sense of participation, and the work becomes more perceptible and tactile. Corresponding to "presence", the production process and production method of art works have always been a side that the audience does not often see, and "art presence" also takes this opportunity to uncover the behind-the-scenes of artistic creation and narrow the distance between the audience and the work.
"Studio" is also an important theme of the exhibition "In Production: A Workplace for Art and Film". Based on the well-known permanent collection of film and video media at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the Western United States, the exhibition explores the history of the interconnectedness of visual arts and film, with a focus on how studio spaces for visual arts and filmmaking have fundamentally changed over the past 20 years.
In the exhibition, we will see the artists' interest in Hollywood history and themes, and they even use the method of film production to invite film actors, makeup artists, prop designers, etc. to create works of art together.
The artist in the first installment was Julie Ozzer, who is based in Los Angeles. Many of O'Ozer's works focus on gender roles and related issues. She often works as a female video artist, thinking about how the mechanics of the filmmaking system are designed by men and why they are still dominated by men.
In Ozawa's earlier work, Bottleneck, the artist recreates a western-themed beauty fight scene from the 1939 film Destry Rides Again. She removed the scene of the male characters watching each other fight in the film, using only their noisy audio to suggest a visually non-existent male audience. The image of two women fighting in an empty artist's studio and the rupture between the film's original audio make this male gaze experience even more visible.
The Fertile Myrtle, Julie Orser, Sound Animation, 4' 29", 2017
Another work, Judy's Nightmare, also shows O'Zer's interest in deconstructing Hollywood films and exploring the issue of gender representation in films. The artist transferred the famous nightmare scene from Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1954, also translated as Ecstasy) from the perspective of the male character to the female character Judy, replacing the picture of the male protagonist falling in the dream with Judy's silhouette, falling into the spider's web representing the stereotype of women. This is also an attempt by Ozawa to transform the gender perspective to reconstruct the connotation of the work.
Ozawa's 2017 audio-animated video, The Fertile Myrtle, continues her reflections on gender issues and tells the absurd path of a woman struggling with infertility; stylistically, she uses ready-made images to create paper-cut collage animations, very similar to "The New Narrator...".
The Yuz Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Qatar Museum Group announced a historic collaboration in October 2019, under which the three institutions jointly developed and shared exhibitions and projects to encourage the exchange of art and ideas between the three cities, each of which is a cultural leader. The yuz Museum of Art and los Angeles County Museum of Art jointly presented the exhibition "In Production: The Workplace for Art and Film", which opened on November 7, 2019, reopened on April 1 after the pandemic, and has been extended to summer 2020
Column Editor-in-Chief: Li Junna Text Editor: Li Junna Caption Source: Provided by the Organizer Photo Editor: Yong Kai