RAPID PULSE is pleased to present
VIDEOROVER: SEASON 6
in partnership with
NURTUREart

The sixth season of Videorover will showcase performance-inspired works made for the camera and to be presented on screen. The works in this exhibition are created using performance as a departure point and medium, privileging the body as the vehicle for production but also looking to the camera as a collaborator. In these works, performance acts allow the camera to complete them, mediating the gap between performer and audience.

Curated by Giana Gambino and Rachel Steinberg, Videorover: Season 6 will feature works by artists: Bridget Batch + Kevin Cooley, Heather Delaney, Kerry Downey in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit and Joanna Seitz, Michael H Hall, Constantin Hartenstein, Gabriel Hosovsky, Lindsay Packer, Daniel Seiple, Alina Tenser, Jacob Tonski, and Roland Wegerer.

NURTUREart’s video program, Videorover aims at becoming an ever-expanding forum for new and emerging video artists. The works included in this season will be shown in a screening event both at NURTUREart Gallery and the Nightingale in Chicago as part of RAPID PULSE International Performance Art Festival.

Video, virtual reality and technologically-mediated experience echo and inform my lo-tech, constructed environments, and sometimes my installations evolve into short videos. All my work points to the delicate balance between what we know and what we suspect about the things we see.

The two work with little conversation, appearing to favor their intuition and instincts as they stack the wood in the form of a Craftsman-style house. An injured bird makes a nest underneath the house and a host of insects move into the layers above. For the woodcarver, a tunnel and staircase lead to the roof, from which he stands above his clutter.

These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

My work addresses the correspondences between private emotion and political consciousness through interdisciplinary, collaborative, and performance-based strategies. I use queerness to subvert the American ideologies of individualism, ambition, progress and self-improvement. My projects, characters, and images embrace flailing uncertainty and playful ambivalence as forms of resistance and agency. I counter the cultural obsession with utility with vulnerability. I offer absurd and defiant proposals for alternative notions of meaning-making, support, community, beauty and intimacy.– KD

I live in Brooklyn. I ride the train to a design studio in Flatiron. I build value into your brand by selecting the perfect typeface. The blue criss-crossing arcs of your logo evoke strength, loyalty, the equinox. Everything is language.

I reach for the soap, gripping it too tightly. It shoots up, ricocheting off the shower wall, hitting my shin. Objects are transformed with a camera. They become signs of themselves. They have been cut loose, set free, slipped out the back door. They are no longer anchored. A photograph’s power is in its ability to release its subject into abstraction. It is graceful and it is unique. The camera presents us with stationary objects so we can experience the mutation and morphing of what we see in them. The language shifts and slips around. We experience the passage of time, of a thing’s eventual end. The world through the lens is abstract, it is unhinged. — JS

Bridget Batch’s recent photographic and video projects have played with aspects of perception while focusing on moments of contemplation and transcendence. She asks what our place in the world is, and where do we “go” when we die, and what that place might be like, she portrays the world in layers of shifting perspectives. The work questions what is reality and consciousness, her personal continuation of a long tradition of artistic and scientific research.

In 1988, together with Martin Knut, Miloš Novák, and Rudolf Sikora he founded the artist group Syzýgia, a significant representative of the Transavanguardia movement in former Czechoslovakia. In 2004, he started to realize projects in various media – photography, public art, video and self edited visual and text projects. In 1992, Hosovsky was one of the final competitors for the project of the Czechoslovak Pavilion for the Expo in Seville and has been awarded by the jury. In 2008, he wrote a documentary book about the life and the art scene of the period between 1988 and 2008. His works are in collections of the East Slovak Gallery in Košice, in Galerie Pohlhammer in Steyr, Austria and in various private collections.

The latest video, Pong with Herself, documents a series of performances on my set. Here, I am playing all of the roles: performer, director, camera operator, and the only editing to the footage is the keying out of the green. Similar to my physical sculptures, this video deals with the duality and role reversal of abstraction and representation. As the bits of object and flesh cutouts move through the frame, they teeter from flat shape to open form; orphic to bulge; and at moments shed their abstraction. The elements progress in agreement, and yet with estrangement from one another. This orbiting, or tension between autonomy and dependence, starts to inform all else in proximity – art objects, people, and architecture. With everything I make, I am trying to understand surface and form through the tension of contact point, and this basic concept of making – hand to resistance.