A SCULPTURE, A FILM AND SIX VIDEOS Exhibition Opens
Tuesday, September 8, 2020 at 12:00pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
FREE! Gallery open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.
On display from Tuesday, September 8 through Sunday, November 22, 2020.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm.
A dedicated website for the exhibition, launching in September 2020, will feature additional screenings, performances, workshops, and artist talks.
A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS is an exhibition of a sculpture, a film, and a survey of six recent large-scale video works presented in a nontraditional, temporal framework. Nestled into a custom-built atrium in the gallery, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ “Son et Lumiere (Le Rayon Vert)” acts as the pivot or fulcrum for the entire exhibition, the rotating kinetic sculpture around which everything else revolves. As the videos will not be seen in the same place at the same time, they will exist in relation to each other only through memory, engaging one of the fundamental properties of the moving image in the structure of the exhibition itself. Artists include Trisha Baga, Renée Green '81, Arthur Jafa, Stanya Kahn, Karrabing Film Collective, and Charlotte Prodger.
The video works address temporal continuities and discontinuities. They connect a deep mystical time to the present tense, visualize cycles, and reach into the future for the potential it may hold for transformation. Referenced in the subtitle of the sculpture, the green ray is a naturally-occurring phenomenon, a flash of green light crossing the sky after the sun has set. In her collected writings, artist Tacita Dean explains that “looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see.” Dean’s 16mm film, The Green Ray (2001), will be screened in the gallery as an event rather than a film installation as it has typically been exhibited. The green ray grounds the temporal framework of the exhibition itself and the specificity of media’s relation to time, delineating difference of time in sculpture, in video, in film, in performance, in event, in exhibition.
Read more about Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ “Son et Lumiere (Le Rayon Vert)” on the A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS exhibition website.