Role - Graphics and Vfx
THE TASK (2017)
Single channel video and sound – 118 min
Directed by Leigh Ledare
Edited by Michael Saia
Originally exhibited at Art Institute Chicago Sep 8 – Dec 31, 2017
True False Film Festival, BAM CinemaFest, American Academy/Rome, Hessel Museum, Metrograph NYC and Criterion Channel
Leigh Ledare’s 2017 film The Task comprises an intervention into a renowned method of experimental social psychology initially developed in the 1950s at London’s Tavistock Institute. Ledare began by staging an immersive three-day Group Relations conference—an intricate feedback apparatus designed to surface and reflect upon unconscious group phenomena—around which he conceived a complex filming structure. In addition to directing the film’s crew, Ledare assembled a diverse group of twenty-eight participants that represented a cross-section of Chicago and secured the collaboration of ten psychologists trained in the method. During a sequence of small and large group encounters, the group enacts a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself—an abstract “task” that allows participants to examine the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics.
…The Task sites the viewer at the intersection between the individual, the group and the camera. The film’s seven chapters focus on the last three of four large group sessions that took place, each of which included all 28 participants, three psychologists (or “consultants”), six camera operators, three observers—and Ledare himself, whose presence serves as both rupture and mirror. Throughout the film, the group’s members confront the emergence of complex patterns of stereotyping and other projections of identity; assumptions around authority are defined, questioned, and transgressed; and viewers of the film are implicated as its members negotiate subjective forces which exceed the structured constraints of the self-made system.
© 2017 Leigh Ledare
Role - Vfx
PSALM 29(30), 2016
Artist: Dara Birnbaum
Six-channel video and sound installation, colour, 8 mins looped, edition 1/3
The genesis of this work dates back to 2014 when, following an extended period of hospitalization, the chanted Psalm 29(30) provided Birnbaum with the possibilities of healing and became a source of inspiration. This is a psalm of thanksgiving, to be sung in pious solemnity. It is believed it was written upon King David’s recovery from a dangerous fit of sickness, and therefore for Birnbaum the psalm also “addresses the contradiction between light and dark, life and death”.
“The whole installation is a meditation on the possibility of healing, an environment formulated so that within its central position one can confront images of war without the spectacle deployed by most mass media and the news industry.” Dara Birnbaum, 2016
Birnbaum’s concern regarding the spectacle of war recalls Susan Sontag’s questioning of war photography. “Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war?” contemplates Sontag. With Psalm 29(30), Birnbaum asks the question: “Can suffering be portrayed in such a way that reflection can take place, in place of manipulated fear, anguish, or anger?”
A pioneering video, media, and installation artist, Birnbaum made her first video installation entitled “Attack piece” in 1975. She always resisted the idea of limiting video to being solely a projection in a darkened space. She is one of the first artists to have designed complex and innovative video installations, juxtaposing video imagery from various sources while integrating large-scale photographs with sculptural or architectural elements. She is also known for having used groundbreaking strategies when manipulating television footage. Over the past four decades Dara Birnbaum has developed a body of work that addresses both the ideological and the aesthetic characters of mass media imagery, and is today considered fundamental to the history of media art.
—GalleriesNow 2016
© Dara Birnbaum and Marian Goodman Gallery
Role - Vfx
Editor - Michael Saia
ALL THE LIGHT THAT’S OURS TO SEE
Artist: Judith Barry
Two channel video – sound installation with custom tables, photographs, and books Dimensions variable
First exhibited Lumiar Cite, Lisbon, 2020
All the light that’s ours to see is an elegiac meditation on our changing viewing habits and how we are being transformed by the evolving forms of media surrounding us. The displacement of Mr. Kim’s infamous New York video stores and his quest to find a home for his 55,000 films is the catalyst for this two-channel installation that explores how architecture, the long history of technological inventions, as well as art and media histories have affected us and the ways in which we engage with media, and by extension with each other.
Visually, this project is a palimpsest of images presented across two screens that cinematically interrogates viewing spaces from the medieval period to present-day media environments. The physical array of the cinematic surround and its location- specific installation allows the viewer to slip between these historical moments and question the changing social situations they have encouraged, alongside the relationships among lost media histories, and ever-evolving emerging audience behaviours.
© Judith Barry 2020