MICA-TV

Biography

Forging an ingenious fusion of pop culture, television and contemporary art, Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen began collaborating as MICA-TV in 1980. Their witty, stylized productions, which mimic and often subvert the formulas and genres of television, include a series of video portraits of visual artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Laurie Simmons.

Departing from the biographical "art documentary," MICA- TV's strategy is to identify specific aural and visual themes with which to succinctly translate their subjects' artistic project into a televisual equivalent. They collaborate with the artist to achieve an analogous mode of presentation, derived from television formats (the talk show, the industrial), that parallels the concerns of the artist's own work. These portraits are rendered with their signature deadpan humor and conceptual sophistication.

In an extension of this collaborative project, CASCADE/Vertical Landscapes (1988) integrates the cultural deconstructions of artists Dan Graham, Dike Blair and Christian Marclay in a postmodern vision of the contemporary American landscape. Deftly transposing artists' ideas into the language of mass media and popular culture, MICA-TV has developed a unique mode of presenting and contextualizing contemporary art.

Klonarides was born in 1951. She received a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, 1972-73, and received an M.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1983. Klonarides was Director of Baskerville Watson Gallery in New York from 1983 to 1987. Since then she has been involved in numerous curatorial projects in art and media, including TV: For Real for Laforet Museum, Tokyo (1989), and Video Data Bank's Video Drive-In (co-curator) in New York's Central Park (1990). She is currently a curator at the Santa Monica Museum in California.

Owen was born in 1952. He received a B.A. from the University of Essex, Colchester, England. As an independent film and video producer/director, he has worked on a broad range of documentaries, music videos and public service announcements, collaborating on projects with Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Jim Jarmusch and Sam Peckinpah. Owen lives in New York.

MICA-TV is the recipient of several awards, including grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. MICA-TV's tapes are in the permanent collections of institutions including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. They have also been widely exhibited at festivals and institutions including the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; The Kitchen, New York; Edward Cella Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, California; Cleveland Art Institute; International Festival of Video & Television, Montbeliard, France; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.