Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Trance, An Exhibition Of Hypnotic Contemporary Video
Although rapid, MTV-style editing may be the mode most commonly associated with contemporary video, a significant number of notable video artists are exploring more deliberate and slowly paced approaches to the medium. Trance: New Work in Video, an exhibition on view from October 6, 1998 through January 10, 1999, will feature seven works made by artists during the 1990s.
The videos in Trance have been edited using techniques such as slow motion and repetition to produce powerful and hypnotic effects. Projected directly onto a large screen, each video will be shown for a period of two weeks. Trance will be on view in the Video Gallery 179 on the first floor.
Featured artists include Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss artist whose video Pamela (1997) is a mesmerizing take on a day in the life of a flight attendant; Canadian Rodney Graham, whom we watch sleep in the back of a van as it drives through the city streets of Vancouver in Halcion Sleep (1994); New Yorker Seoungho Cho, a native of South Korea whose work, Identical Time (1997), presents images of a blighted subway journey to reflect upon urban isolation and dislocation; Philadelphia's Peter Rose, who explores subterranean rituals that celebrate the solstices and equinoxes of the sun in Understory (1997); Helen Mirra, a resident of Chicago, excerpts Jean Vigo's 1934 film L'Atalante in Third (1998), a spellbinding video in which time seems suspended; British artist Abigail Lane whose work Never Never Mind lyrically blends sound and image to capture a few pigeons in a seemingly "neurotic" moment; and American Bill Viola, who created The Passing (1991) as a personal response to birth and death in the family.
Trance has been organized by Kathleen Forde of the Department of 20th-Century Art.
