JUNE 30 - JULY 5
[VIDEO EXHIBITION]

OPENING: TUESDAY, JUNE 30th > 19h
July 1-5 > 14h - 21h

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FREE ENTRANCE
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"AFTER THE END / WORK VALUE"


Erik MOSKOWITZ, Amanda TRAGER: Cloud Cuckoo Land
Video | 0:16:27
USA | 2008


Cloud Cuckoo Land is collaboration between Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager. The title of the piece, Cloud Cuckoo Land is taken from the Aristophanes' play The Birds. In the 4th Century BC, the notion of utopia was already in play-and put into doubt. The narrative encompasses a family's move to a contemporary commune. The central character, Bianca, after years of fantasizing about the ideal way to raise her child and with fixed, romantic notions of the "best" way to live, is confronted by her own intolerance and inability to integrate with the community. The video's narrative exploits conventional cinematic devices (shot/reverse shot, music cues) and is meant for exhibition in gallery and museum space as well as in cinematic space. The video critiques assumptions too easily relied upon when determining the difference between public and private space. The prescribed boundary between art space and cinema space functions as a model of the larger issue whereby artificial and arbitrary boundaries are used to define conventions of personal and societal comfort and safety.

Erik Moskowitz uses the relationship between cinema space and gallery space as a point of departure for installation and film. Amanda Trager fuses painting, sculpture, and installation with first-person prose narrative. The artists' involvement with fractured narrative or anti-narrative is of long-standing in their independent practices. For Moskowitz it dates back to childhood, when Spalding Gray invited him to perform in the Wooster Group's Sakonnet Point. His work with Spalding continued for the next eight years; his relationship with Joan Jonas dates from this period. More recently, Moskowitz has been known for music/video installations based on excerpts from literary sources. Erik Moskowitz exhibitions: Momenta Art, NYC (2008) ; Freight and Volume, NYC (2006) ; Holiday, NYC (2005) ; Le Sous Salon, Paris (2005) ; "Exposition 5-31 Janvier 2009", Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Cherbourg, France (2009) ; "Melodrama", Sara Meltzer Gallery, NYC (2008); Impakt, Netherlands (2007) ; Antimatter, Canada (2007 and 2006). Amanda Trager exhibitions: Momenta Art, NYC (2008 and 2001) ; Le Sous Salon, Paris (2005) ; Clifford-Smith Gallery, Boston (1998) ; Annika Sundvik Gallery, NYC (1996) ; "Exposition 5-31 Janvier 2009", Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Cherbourg, France (2009) ; Tina B.-The Prague Contemporary Art Festival (2008) ; Brooklyn Museum's "Open House" (2004) ; NextNext Visual Art program, Brooklyn Academy of Music (2004); White Box Gallery, NYC (1998); Feature Gallery, NYC (1996).