#piece titled “futility” from 2022

[riayuun]

[findinginga]

“She can’t be all bad. No one is.”

 “Well, she comes the closest.”  (Out of the Past -1947)

I was thinking back to another film noir when I remembered the dialogue which I used as the title of this post.  The femme fatale of this absolute classic is Kathy, portrayed by Jane Greer.  As the tale unfolds we learn that Kathy is self-absorbed and ruthless in her ambition.  Dangerous and beautiful, she users her sexuality as a club.  If the club does not work, she is not afraid to turn to a more permanent solution.

I will freely admit that I may never actually have all the puzzle pieces to solve the enigma of Ingeborga.  I agree that "she can't be all bad".  After all, she is an attentive and nurturing mother to Eva.  But even in this area one has to question Inga's motivation.  One could argue that the energy and accommodations Inga makes to to keep Eva happy, to salve any disappointment, may be attempts by Inga to shield her own self-esteem.  There may be an overriding concern that the unconditional love that is normally given by a child may be threatened thereby diminishing narcissistic supply.

From my experience, Inga was the most difficult of all the women I encountered over the course of my life.  For all the reasons previously cited in the telling of this story and for those to come, I had to conclude that Inga could be the prototypical femme fatale.

Where were we...

I was left in early January 2022 with the strong suspicion that some major life event was taking place for Inga.  She either engaged in "future faking*" over the trip to Cancun or something or someone became an obstruction.  It is difficult to imagine someone passing up an all expenses week in the sun (especially when living in the northwest corner of Russia) over a dispute regarding who would purchase tickets.    It is true that if Inga had acquiesced to my request and provided all of Eva's information, it would have undermined her previous assertions that Denis was not Eva's father.  So, it is possible Inga was attempting to save face and avoid a hit to her self-esteem.  It was a tangle of plausible explanations.

*Future faking - a manipulative tactic used by individuals, often narcissists, to lure others into a relationship or gain something they want. Done without intention of ultimate follow through.

Texting was not enough and talking was futile...

It was no longer sufficient for me to communicate with Inga through email or IM.  I wanted to speak with her directly.  I attempted, on multiple occasions to telephone her with my calls either not ringing through or with messages that the telephone subscriber was not available.  I then attempted to initiate a video chat with her via Telegram.  These attempts were refused.  I texted Inga and asked her to provide a time during the day where I might phone.  She replied that 4:00 pm (10:00 am for me) would be best.  I collected my thoughts and promptly initiated a video call at the appointed time.

To my surprise, Inga answered but it was obvious that she was outside her home and walking.  She explained that she needed to arrive at the post office before it closed.  I was annoyed by having to speak with her while she was clearly distracted, attempting to walk along the icy ground.  Indeed, at one point she actually slipped and fell.  Inga was again sending a clear message to me that I was not a priority for her and that my concerns did not matter enough to her to grant the simple courtesy of a focused discussion.  (N.B. It was also possible that Inga could not speak with me at home because of Denis.)  Whether Inga could not speak with me from home, or would not, I would never know.  What was obvious was Inga would not engage in a discussion regarding the recent turn of events - her distractions, her distancing, her demands to the way I addressed her, or her dramatic change of plans.  When I pointed out that I was at least owed an explanation, Inga flared and emphatically stated that she did not have to explain herself to anyone.  Further, she stated that she would not speak to me any further as I was "too aggressive".

The backlash of a covert narcissist... 

Inga had responded by suggesting she was beyond reproach or any criticism.  Her insistence that she owed no explanations was a defense to her humiliation and rage.  Her self-esteem was deflated, and, no doubt, she was hearing that internal voice reminding her that it would all inevitably come to this point.

Another scope of work for the PI was needed.

[micaramel]

Artist: Jennifer West

Venue: JOAN, Los Angeles

Exhibition Title: Future Forgetting

Date: February 28 – April 26, 2020

Organized By: David Matorin

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of JOAN, Los Angeles

Press Release:

Conversation with artist Jennifer West and special guest, writer Norman Klein moderated by curator and writer Lauren Mackler.

JOAN Los Angeles is pleased to present​ Future Forgetting​, a solo exhibition of new film and sculptural works by Jennifer West. In this homecoming exhibition–the artist’s first solo show for more than 8 years in her native L.A.–West turns her lens on the city itself, bringing her ongoing exploration of the materiality of film to bear on matters of memory, place, and preservation. The exhibition is comprised of two major “analogital” works (West’s term for her hybrid video-films), and an ancillary Zine of the type West has created for all her solo exhibitions, documenting the thoughts and process surrounding the work. ​Future Forgetting​’s zine is not confined to the printed page but takes form as a sculptural display of text, images and objects.

Each piece of ​Future Forgetting ​draws inspiration and figurative or literal material from the Los Angeles River–the often dry, concrete-encased waterway that curls through the notoriously heterogeneous quarters of the city in a circuitous comma, connecting the disparate parts of L.A. like independent clauses of a sentence. The show’s title is inspired by the epilogue of novelist and urban historian Norman Klein’s influential text “The History of Forgetting” (1997), in which he describes the “erasure of memory” that repeats itself in the constructed mythology and physical infrastructure of Los Angeles, as well as the deceptive veneer of downtown L.A.’s urban renewal. ​Future Forgetting ​uses the physical texture of film to describe Los Angeles as both a place and an image at once–an unstable construction that erodes and replenishes with time’s ebb and flow.

The large video projection, ​6th Street Bridge Film ​(2020) is a transfer of intentionally damaged, discolored, tinted, dyed, and etched 16mm film. The footage documents the last days of the 6th Street Viaduct–the iconic L.A. river-spanning bridge that included an access tunnel which allowed motorists and film crews (permitted or otherwise) to drive from the street onto the river’s concrete embankments. Its downtown location is famous for its long list of cameos in Hollywood films such as “Point Blank” (1967), “Grease” (1978), “Repo Man” (1984) and “Terminator 2” (1991). The viaduct was demolished in 2016 for concerns over its structural integrity despite obtaining an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument designation. The city is replacing the bridge with a new design set to open in 2022. In West’s film, a cross-section of Angelenos assembles to commemorate the bridge’s passing. Film and car enthusiasts, graffiti writers, photographers, and urban explorers drive, walk, and linger upon the bridge’s expanse and the river below for the last time. In 2019, West re-entered the riverbed below the viaduct’s former location with the film she’d shot three years ​prior. Unspooling the developed rolls, she submerged her reels into the river’s water, dragging them through the algae, sediment and detritus picked up on the river’s journey through the city. The treatment destroyed her original film prints but she preserved them, along with the river’s imprint on their surface, on 16mm negative stock. The surface discoloration and decomposition seen in the film’s 4K video transfer are the results of this process–using the river as a treatment for its own image.

The second major work originates further upriver at the Arroyo Seco Confluence in South Pasadena. For years during walks near her home, West had observed a preponderance of shattered TVs in Arroyo Seco’s seasonally dry riverbed. Apparently thrown from surrounding bridges to the cement below, the perplexing gesture seemed born partly of careless disregard and partly of destructive malice, but she imagined how it could be a kind of silent protest against consumer society, planned obsolescence or the tyranny of images. The cinematic, apocalyptic image of L.A.’s barren river littered with cast-off electronics inspired her to preserve the evidence of these futile acts of violence against disposable technology. She began collecting the splintered fragments of circuit board or mirrored and translucent screen intermingled with other flotsam and jetsam that had washed downriver–old CDs and stereo pieces; electric organ keys and torn audio speakers; broken golf clubs from the Arroyo Seco Golf Course, and stray arrows from Pasadena Roving Archers. West arranged the random sampling of scavenged debris by type and filmed it in 16mm on green screen backgrounds. The filming’s irreverent style echoes the miscellany of the dredged collection. The artist’s cat is glimpsed walking in and out of frame, occasionally settling in the center, indifferent to the film production in process. During the film’s telecine transfer, a loose electrical cable caused the background screen to flash from green to magenta. West includes this glitching footage in a further embrace of indeterminacy and accident. The resulting work, ​Archaeology of Smashed Flatscreen Televisions Thrown off Bridges​ (2020), is an installation of flatscreen monitors facing upward from the floor, each showing a different section of her collected things. West displays her collection on top of each monitor’s screen, doubling the fragmented objects with their immaterial likeness in 16mm below. The taxonomic display is like an archeological case study of L.A.’s physical evidence–artifacts of our moment seen from some future time when our ecologically inevitable fate has already taken place.

Jennifer West​ is an artist who has explored materialism in film for over ten years. Born in Topanga, California, West lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a BA with film and video emphasis from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She has lectured widely on her ideas of the “Analogital” and is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze and Mousse Magazine. West has produced eleven Zine artist books which were recently acquired by the Getty Museum. Her work is in museum and public collections such as and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Foundation (San Francisco/Paris), Zabludowicz Collection (London); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Depart Foundation (Rome); Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania; Henry Art Gallery (Seattle); Rubell Collection (Florida); Saatchi Collection (London), among others. Significant commissions include Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, 2016-2017; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Art Night, London, 2016; High Line Art, New York, 2012; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2010; and Turbine Hall at TATE Modern, London, 2009. Her solo exhibitions include: Emoji Piss Film, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, 2018; “ Is Film Over?, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Film is Dead…, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, 2017; Action Movies, Painted Films and History Collage, Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, 2017; Flashlights Filmstrips Projections, Tramway, Glasgow, 2016; Aloe Vera and Butter, S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK (2012); Paintballs and Pickle Juice, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nuremberg, (2010); Perspectives 171: Jennifer West, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, (2010); Lemon Juice and Lithium, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); White Room: Jennifer West, White Columns, New York, (2007).

Link: Jennifer West at JOAN

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2RCWk9f

[topmixtrends]

Welcome to LARB Ball, our new sports and culture column! From race and gender to fandom and sociability, athletics and education, fashion and advertising, the pleasures of play, the concussions, the anthem, the protests, the gambling, the violence, the money — this is the world of sports we seek to address. We’re looking for a diverse group of critics, scholars, and fans to go beyond the highlights and the play-by-play to the bigger questions that make sports both exciting and essential, for those who don’t watch and those who can’t stop. If you’re interested in writing, get in touch at larbball@gmail.com!

As the 2018 World Cup comes to a close, many fans—not least US supporters—will already be hoping for better prospects in four years. Some self-interested North Americans may even have set their sights on 2026. But the competition will first pass through Qatar, the next stop on the international football corruption circuit detailed last year in David Conn’s The Fall of the House of FIFA.

Qatar was hardly an obvious choice. With its soaring summer temperatures and lack of the basic infrastructure to host a tournament of this scale, it seemed like the last place to pick. Since its controversial selection in 2010, the emirate has raced to build eight new stadiums. This despite the ongoing blockade, led by Saudi Arabia since June 2017, that has slowed the supply of building materials, turning the construction sprint into something more like marathon walking. Work on the largest of these projects, Norman Foster’s expectantly named “Iconic Stadium” in Lusail, has been slow to launch. In the meantime, the smaller Al Wakrah Stadium, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Zaha Hadid before her death in 2016, has grabbed the headlines, both for its evocative, unmistakably vaginal, shape and for shining a light on the dark shadows cast by the Gulf’s gleaming new skylines.

Landmark buildings, especially those with starchitect imprimatur and spiraling budgets, tend to become sounding boards for social and political malaise, and indeed the new Qatari stadiums have amplified accusations of worker abuse. Even before construction commenced, Al Wakrah sparked an architecture-world scandal when Hadid sued Martin Filler and the New York Review of Books for defamation. Filler had accused the architect of being indifferent to the deaths of thousands of workers involved in Qatar’s World Cup projects. As reported by The Guardian in early 2014, more than 500 Indian and 382 Nepalese migrant workers had died in the two years since building began, a problem, Hadid insisted, that governments, not architects, should solve.

Hadid had a point: contractors had yet to break ground on Al Wakrah, so no one could have died on her watch. But while her lawsuit earned an apology from Filler, workers in Qatar were still dying. Maybe not on Hadid’s project, but still. Meanwhile, as a 2016 Amnesty International investigation revealed, many more faced dire working and living conditions that artist-critic skirmishes seem unlikely to improve. Even if Hadid was right that the stadiums’ architects had no “duty” to maintain worker safety—surely a dubious claim—what government did she have in mind? Could anyone count on the one in Qatar?

On the face of it, the Qatari government had a lot to lose. Its World Cup bid had been a masterful set piece, played with all the finesse of soft geopolitical power (even if, as many allege, it had to be hammered home with the brute force of money). But simply acquiring the bid wouldn’t be enough. As the bid’s PR director put it to David Conn, Qatar 2022 was meant to promote an image of “warmth, hospitality, economic development beyond oil and gas, openness to the world and being a positive interface between the Arab world and the rest of the world.” Yes, money would flow in too, but Qatar has plenty of money. What it needs more is a positive image projected on a global stage.

At the World Cup, stadiums like Lusail Iconic and Al Wakrah are the stage, however much they may disappear into the visual sameness of televised sports once the matches begin. In Qatar, more than ever, they’re supposed to represent wealth and the power it permits (the power, even, to control the desert environment with open-air climate control). If the stadiums come to signify human rights abuses and the depths of corruption rather than the heights of power and prestige, so much for that World Cup sheen.

What then to do about the workers?

Earlier this month, PBS took up the question with a broadcast of The Workers Cup, a documentary (premiered at Sundance) about some of the 1.6 million migrant laborers currently working on projects like Al Wakrah stadium. Produced by a Qatari-based team in 2017 and directed by Adam Sobel, an American who was living in Doha during the lead-up to the FIFA 2022 selection, it will hardly inspire confidence in Qatar’s response. Though the film has little to say about worker fatalities like those reported by The Guardian, it narrates the slower death—of freedom, of possibility, of hope—that these migrants struggle against every day.

The Workers Cup takes its title from an annual event first launched in 2013 by the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC), the organization overseeing Qatar 2022, and sponsored by the Qatari professional football league. Modelled on FIFA’s crown jewel, the competition features 32 teams (upped from 24 in 2017) comprised of workers representing the contractors involved in World Cup preparations. It looks something like a corporate softball league, just with more fans—many more fans—and poorer players. The workers take it seriously, though, and it’s all good fun, for a while at least. The players win a week off work to train between group stage matches, while the non-playing workers don appropriately comical outfits and invest more emotion than you’re likely to find from the average American soccer fan.

Sobel and crew follow the action in fairly conventional documentary style. The film flows from match to match, interspersed with player/worker interviews and data, mostly in the form of intertitles, about Qatar and its labor politics. We learn, for instance, that workers comprise 60% of the population, that they live, by law, segregated from everyone else, that many work twelve-hour shifts, seven days per week (despite a six-day legal limit), and that some are forced (again illegally) to hand over their passports to their employers.

The film focuses on a small group of players for the Gulf Contracting Company (GCC). Hailing from countries including Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, and India, they offer a range of migrant tales. The film opens with the most apropos: the story of team captain Kenneth, an ambitious would-be footballer who was lured from Ghana by a recruiting agent who promised a spot on a professional club team. The reality ends up being far different, and Kenneth becomes a typical case: $1,600 poorer, 4,000 miles from home, and crammed into a labor camp. Others have similarly tragic stories. Kenyan co-captain Paul, for instance, made his way to Qatar only after losing his bartending job at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi after the 2013 terrorist attack that left at least 67 dead.

Their teammates’ stories are no less dreadful for being more banal. Lacking opportunities back home, many have been working in Qatar for years (some by way of Dubai first) in a futile attempt to amass enough wealth either to bring their families or simply to return home better off. Faced with poverty, violence, or geopolitical instability, stable work of any kind looks like opportunity. Day-to-day life in the Gulf, however, challenges even this limited hope. The men, packed cheek-by-jowl into ordered housing blocks, lead lonely lives. Far from their families, forbidden even from entering the very places they’ve built, and unable to make lasting connections beyond the camps, they live in a kind of purgatory.

Football is their escape. These workers may never become goal-scoring stars, but for a few weeks, or even just a few hours, they could achieve the higher goal, as one player puts it, “not to be considered as workers, but as footballers.” It’s great while it lasts, but the weight of normalcy hits hard when it ends. Without giving too much away, the film’s emotional arc predictably peaks towards the tournament’s conclusion with a penalty shootout. In Qatar, these men might be footballers for a short time, but they’ll always be workers.

¤

What good is football, anyway? What value does it have for these migrant workers—or for that matter, for us, the fans and critics? The Workers Cup doesn’t always tackle these questions head-on, but there’s a cynical allegory struggling to get out. Over the course of the film, Kenneth and his teammates come to realize that the tournament is just a cover for something else. One player, initially excited about coverage the team has been getting back in his native Nepal, laments that their fame will just become another selling point for corrupt recruiters—his escape turned into a snare for someone else like him. One can imagine an agent back in Ghana selling the team’s story to another hopeful Kenneth. In a particularly charged post-tournament scene, another worker voices the painful truth that “it was never about football.” Their Workers Cup was just management’s publicity stunt: a spectacle of corporate welfare to distract the world from labor abuse.

The film never asks how far this realization extends. There’s a powerful story here about workers in Qatar, but does it have anything to say about the tournament they’re building—or about the professional sport beyond it? As the story of FIFA corruption illuminates, the World Cup too is a cover for many things that are never about football—not least geopolitical power. For the past few weeks, football has normalized Putin’s politics, and in 2022, it will do the same for the Qatari labor practices that made it possible. Even the Trump administration has tried to boost itself on a 2026 tournament that it had little to do with and won’t be around to witness.

It would be easy to dismiss football as the cover known as false consciousness. It’s a familiar charge. To watch pro sports is to watch the zeros pile up, on bank notes as on scoreboards. Those zeros buy political power and reinforce global inequality. They keep us in sports arenas rather than political ones. At best, they buy escapism—an opportunity to bask in athletic excellence, elite competition, and the simple pleasures of play. It’s fun, but is it worth it?

For Team GCC, it both is and isn’t. These workers need escape as much as anyone, but some also see an opportunity to build on their success. Kenneth tries to start a football club, but management isn’t interested—the company is there to build stadiums, not communities. Others find something more abstract in the game: a kind of freedom, or what one player, invoking Bob Marley, describes as emancipation from mental slavery. For these players, the beauty of the “beautiful game” is its imagination and creativity—the freedom to learn and test the limits of a world.

German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin once similarly described play as a repetitive form of trial, error, and self-discovery. Struggling over an “object of love” like a football, he argued, was one of life’s most essential gestures. Through it, we learn “the rhythms in which we first gain possession of ourselves.” The essence of this learning through play, for Benjamin, was repetition. To grow up is to learn habits, and to find pleasure in their replication. Play is the therapy that makes growing up possible. Part of the pleasure of sport is to evoke the childlike world of possibility that comes with every struggle to improve.

To play or watch sports is to imagine and create, to learn to be better. This is escapism, yes, but not an escape to nowhere. In the age of Trump we need this kind of escape—this opportunity to think and dream otherwise—as much as ever. Who can be saddled with these politics all the time? This isn’t to say, as Trump would, that sports should be without politics. Sports is always about politics. So too, politics is a kind of sport; a struggle over an object of love—the world we share. Benjamin reminds us that it’s all about how you play. Some of us use games to learn how to grow up and be better, all while retaining play’s childlike pleasures and its power of creativity. Others just remain childish.

The post Workers of the World Cup: On Qatar 2022 and the Future of FIFA appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2uBd1Gq

[micaramel]

Artist: Jennifer West

Venue: JOAN, Los Angeles

Exhibition Title: Future Forgetting

Date: February 28 – April 26, 2020

Organized By: David Matorin

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of JOAN, Los Angeles

Press Release:

Conversation with artist Jennifer West and special guest, writer Norman Klein moderated by curator and writer Lauren Mackler.

JOAN Los Angeles is pleased to present​ Future Forgetting​, a solo exhibition of new film and sculptural works by Jennifer West. In this homecoming exhibition–the artist’s first solo show for more than 8 years in her native L.A.–West turns her lens on the city itself, bringing her ongoing exploration of the materiality of film to bear on matters of memory, place, and preservation. The exhibition is comprised of two major “analogital” works (West’s term for her hybrid video-films), and an ancillary Zine of the type West has created for all her solo exhibitions, documenting the thoughts and process surrounding the work. ​Future Forgetting​’s zine is not confined to the printed page but takes form as a sculptural display of text, images and objects.

Each piece of ​Future Forgetting ​draws inspiration and figurative or literal material from the Los Angeles River–the often dry, concrete-encased waterway that curls through the notoriously heterogeneous quarters of the city in a circuitous comma, connecting the disparate parts of L.A. like independent clauses of a sentence. The show’s title is inspired by the epilogue of novelist and urban historian Norman Klein’s influential text “The History of Forgetting” (1997), in which he describes the “erasure of memory” that repeats itself in the constructed mythology and physical infrastructure of Los Angeles, as well as the deceptive veneer of downtown L.A.’s urban renewal. ​Future Forgetting ​uses the physical texture of film to describe Los Angeles as both a place and an image at once–an unstable construction that erodes and replenishes with time’s ebb and flow.

The large video projection, ​6th Street Bridge Film ​(2020) is a transfer of intentionally damaged, discolored, tinted, dyed, and etched 16mm film. The footage documents the last days of the 6th Street Viaduct–the iconic L.A. river-spanning bridge that included an access tunnel which allowed motorists and film crews (permitted or otherwise) to drive from the street onto the river’s concrete embankments. Its downtown location is famous for its long list of cameos in Hollywood films such as “Point Blank” (1967), “Grease” (1978), “Repo Man” (1984) and “Terminator 2” (1991). The viaduct was demolished in 2016 for concerns over its structural integrity despite obtaining an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument designation. The city is replacing the bridge with a new design set to open in 2022. In West’s film, a cross-section of Angelenos assembles to commemorate the bridge’s passing. Film and car enthusiasts, graffiti writers, photographers, and urban explorers drive, walk, and linger upon the bridge’s expanse and the river below for the last time. In 2019, West re-entered the riverbed below the viaduct’s former location with the film she’d shot three years ​prior. Unspooling the developed rolls, she submerged her reels into the river’s water, dragging them through the algae, sediment and detritus picked up on the river’s journey through the city. The treatment destroyed her original film prints but she preserved them, along with the river’s imprint on their surface, on 16mm negative stock. The surface discoloration and decomposition seen in the film’s 4K video transfer are the results of this process–using the river as a treatment for its own image.

The second major work originates further upriver at the Arroyo Seco Confluence in South Pasadena. For years during walks near her home, West had observed a preponderance of shattered TVs in Arroyo Seco’s seasonally dry riverbed. Apparently thrown from surrounding bridges to the cement below, the perplexing gesture seemed born partly of careless disregard and partly of destructive malice, but she imagined how it could be a kind of silent protest against consumer society, planned obsolescence or the tyranny of images. The cinematic, apocalyptic image of L.A.’s barren river littered with cast-off electronics inspired her to preserve the evidence of these futile acts of violence against disposable technology. She began collecting the splintered fragments of circuit board or mirrored and translucent screen intermingled with other flotsam and jetsam that had washed downriver–old CDs and stereo pieces; electric organ keys and torn audio speakers; broken golf clubs from the Arroyo Seco Golf Course, and stray arrows from Pasadena Roving Archers. West arranged the random sampling of scavenged debris by type and filmed it in 16mm on green screen backgrounds. The filming’s irreverent style echoes the miscellany of the dredged collection. The artist’s cat is glimpsed walking in and out of frame, occasionally settling in the center, indifferent to the film production in process. During the film’s telecine transfer, a loose electrical cable caused the background screen to flash from green to magenta. West includes this glitching footage in a further embrace of indeterminacy and accident. The resulting work, ​Archaeology of Smashed Flatscreen Televisions Thrown off Bridges​ (2020), is an installation of flatscreen monitors facing upward from the floor, each showing a different section of her collected things. West displays her collection on top of each monitor’s screen, doubling the fragmented objects with their immaterial likeness in 16mm below. The taxonomic display is like an archeological case study of L.A.’s physical evidence–artifacts of our moment seen from some future time when our ecologically inevitable fate has already taken place.

Jennifer West​ is an artist who has explored materialism in film for over ten years. Born in Topanga, California, West lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a BA with film and video emphasis from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She has lectured widely on her ideas of the “Analogital” and is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze and Mousse Magazine. West has produced eleven Zine artist books which were recently acquired by the Getty Museum. Her work is in museum and public collections such as and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Foundation (San Francisco/Paris), Zabludowicz Collection (London); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Depart Foundation (Rome); Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania; Henry Art Gallery (Seattle); Rubell Collection (Florida); Saatchi Collection (London), among others. Significant commissions include Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, 2016-2017; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Art Night, London, 2016; High Line Art, New York, 2012; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2010; and Turbine Hall at TATE Modern, London, 2009. Her solo exhibitions include: Emoji Piss Film, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, 2018; “ Is Film Over?, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Film is Dead…, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, 2017; Action Movies, Painted Films and History Collage, Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, 2017; Flashlights Filmstrips Projections, Tramway, Glasgow, 2016; Aloe Vera and Butter, S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK (2012); Paintballs and Pickle Juice, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nuremberg, (2010); Perspectives 171: Jennifer West, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, (2010); Lemon Juice and Lithium, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); White Room: Jennifer West, White Columns, New York, (2007).

Link: Jennifer West at JOAN

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3cddkus