Curator: PAUL YOUNG
"I’ve been working on an exhibition for the Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona for nearly a year now, and in the process I’ve come across a number of interesting film and video artists that I’m quite excited about. What I find interesting about each of these works in the ways in which each one conducts a formal inquiry into the nature of the medium, while at the same time touching on ideas about communication, art history and in some cases, cinema. What’s more, I’m particularly drawn to the fact that each tends to be relatively accessible.
What I didn’t consider until later was that the majority of them are either from, or schooled in, the United Kingdom. Nor did I consider gender issues when selecting each. Rather, I chose these works because I believe they’re all pushing the medium in interesting ways, and yet they all seem to share a common lyricism and poetic value." –Paul Young
Thorsten Brinkmann
Se king 7min. 30sec. 2009
I first saw Thorsten Brinkmann’s work at the annual LOOP video art fair a couple of years ago. He’s based in Berlin and he’s better known for his photographs and sculptures that are generally made from found objects.
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J Tobias Anderson
The Wind 3min. 44sec. 2009
J Tobias Anderson is a Swedish artist and filmmaker who graduated from the Royal Collage of Art in Stockholm. He often uses animation and found footage to explore ideas about film history and genre theory, often by quoting scenes from Alfred Hitchcock and his contemporaries, and often by focusing in on a specific cinematic convention.
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John Smith
ASSOCIATIONS 7min. 1975
John Smith is one of my favorite experimental film artists. He’s based in the UK and studied at the Royal College of Art. He’s perhaps best know for “Girl Chewing Gum” (1976), where he takes documentary footage of a common street, and then adds the voice-over of a movie director trying to direct the action.
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John Wood & Paul Harrison
One More Kilometer 2min. 45sec. 2009
Humor is undoubtedly the most conspicuous aspect of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s video work. In many respects it bears a similarity to a number of West Coast artists of the 1960s and 70s, namely William Wegman, John Baldessari and Allen Ruppersberg.
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PAUL YOUNG
Paul Young is a journalist and curator based in Los Angeles. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Elle, Variety, Angeleno, Dwell, Surface, Artnews, Art & Auction and many more. His weekly column, "Untitled," which covered contemporary art issues, ran in the Los Angeles Times for two years, and his "City Art" column ran in Angeleno for nearly five years. He is also the author of Art Cinema (Taschen), which explores ways in which art practices converge with moving imagery, and he curates video programs and exhibitions worldwide. His most recent is "CinemaLoop," an invitational video installation at Arco 2010 (Madrid) and "Remote Viewing," a large-scale survey of contemporary video, which travels to the Centre d'Art Santa Monica in Barcelona in May 2010.
