EAI PRESENTS AT MONKEYTOWN
OCTOBER 2005: IMAGINATION STATION
EAI PRESENTS AT MONKEYTOWN
OCTOBER 2005: IMAGINATION STATION
58 North 3rd Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
EAI PRESENTS AT MONKEYTOWN
OCTOBER 2005: IMAGINATION STATION
58 North 3rd Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
EAI PRESENTS AT MONKEYTOWN
OCTOBER 2005: IMAGINATION STATION
58 North 3rd Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Works
In the first episode of the misadventures of his alter-ego "Mike," Smith introduces his deadpan anti-hero in a day-in-the-life story that is saturated with references to the junk-television culture of the '50s, '60s and '70s. A puzzled innocent who throws a party to which no one comes, Mike...
Appropriating a dated exercise video hosted by actress Angela Lansbury, Feeling Free presents a woman, played by Moulton, who attempts to follow the televised workout in her living room even as elements of her home décor begin to appear onscreen. Moulton subjects the footage to eccentric visual and audio displacements, culminating in a psychedelic dance sequence set to a remix of the program's insipid theme song.
Commissioned by VideoGram International, Ltd., for a videodisc of music by Jimi Hendrix, Fire! uses the stylized visuals and pacing of a music video to critique the representational economies of sexuality and consumerism. Translating the psychedelic fervor of the Hendrix song into a...
Go For It, Mike is a parodic music video that re-envisions the Horatio Alger myth of the American Dream via 1950s-style cultural cliches, advertising and Reagan-era media propaganda. Smith's "regular guy" Mike embodies a series of all-American male stereotypes, from the classroom to political...
Layered with a tension-laden crescendo of rock guitars and gunshots, Kojak/Wang is a volatile pastiche of fast-paced, repeated images from Kojak (commercial TV), an ad for the Wang Corporation (TV commercial), and color bars. Birnbaum equates the violence of the crime drama shoot-out and the violence of corporate America.
Here, "another regular day" in the life of Mike reveals a world completely envisioned and experienced through the images and slogans of the media. Mike enacts his daily routine — waking, shaving, dressing — as if he were in one advertisement after another. His language is the empty jargon of ad...
Mike Builds a Shelter is a performance comedy with apocalyptic overtones, a narrative extension of Smith's installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/Snack Bar. In this darkly humorous morality play, Smith contrasts Mike's rural adventures in a pastoral landscape with his home fallout...
Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the "real" woman's symbolic...
The first installment in the multi-part Whispering Pines series, this unsettling video introduces Cynthia, the silent, somewhat confused protagonist played by Moulton. In these wryly humorous narratives, Cynthia's interactions with her everyday world mix the mundane and the surreal. A portrait of anxiety set in a generic supermarket, this work foregrounds Moulton's concerns with how people are at once estranged from and invested in consumer goods.
Presenting a domestic world just slightly askew, this work follows Moulton's character Cynthia as she attempts to navigate the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home décor. Wearing a dress embedded with a "medical pillow," Cynthia illustrates how contemporary identity is bound up in relationships with banal, functionless luxury objects.
Whispering Pines 3 continues Moulton's evocatively oblique video series. Seated in an easy chair, wearing a multi-colored neck brace and surrounded by odd home decorations, Moulton's protagonist Cynthia allows us a glimpse into uncanny psychic spaces and an inner life that seems to oscillate between concerns with animals and mass-market objets d'art.
