The Connective Corridor is pleased to sponsor and promote the current Urban Video Project installation:

Shimon Attie — Sightings (2012)

Total run time: 11:32

Sightings is the fruit of Shimon Attie’s residency at UVP in 2012. For this piece, Attie revisits and re-contextualizes footage that was shot for a three channel piece originally created for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Attie describes his process:

“For Sightings, I created a video installation exploring the heightened moment of mutual encounter between art viewer and art object, between works of art and museum visitors and employees. I selected 40 objects from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and asked individuals to participate in a “dialogue” with a work of art, each taking an expressive gesture and gaze that embodied their emotional response to the art object … Slow-motion cinematography, frozen gestures, and an unseen moving stage comment on the active/passive quality of the interactions.

For the UVP iteration, this source footage was radically re-edited into a single channel piece that emphasizes rhythm and dynamic tension between the viewer and the viewed. Orbiting like twin stars around a shared focus, the two punctually eclipse one another, occluding our own view and reminding us that we, too, are part of this dialogue.”

In the words of Serge Daney, “All form is a face looking at us.”

Sightings will be on view at UVP Everson (North facade of the Everson building) through December 29, 2012, Thursday through Saturday nights from dusk until 11 p.m.

About the Artist

Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Shimon Attie has received international recognition for his installations that incorporate a variety of media including installation art, video, photography, performance, new media, and public art. His work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Jewish Museum, New York; and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, among many others. The artist has lived and worked in New York City since 1997.