David Matorin "The Power of the Immoveable Object"
Broadway Windows
This event has ended.
Using images collected from readymade content for commercial video and architectural design, The Power of the Immoveable Object (Broadway Windows) is comprised of three videos and two digital prints which highlight the reification of commerce in a climate of economic anxiety. The work is inspired by the contradictory status of the Broadway windows as a camouflaged public art space and a dysfunctional retail display. The videos present pulsing, seductive architectonic shapes which are elusive in function and meaning; "a display for a store with nothing to buy”, as the artist puts it.
As to the role of technology in the work, Matorin notes that “Apple’s Final Cut Studio is where I spend most of my time. .... I wanted to produce a series of videos that would invoke the indebted relationship I have to these tools.” Limiting himself “to only the libraries of default content Apple packages with their software” and “websites which provide free, downloadable 3D models ... for populating virtual 3D spaces” Matorin absorbed into his iconography virtual “effects [turned into] static objects”.
The imagery in Matorin's animations and prints, “are all sourced from companies that provide free content for workers within video production and architectural design industries." While most of the artists oeuvre has been "appropriated from copy-righted sources" here he was interested in the way "these elements are given away in a sort of reversal, or re-appropriation, by commerce of the subversive element associated with" open-source material and free-ware. This strategy seeks to expose "the way systems of capital adapt and subsume anything they come into contact with, [particularly] elements that take a critical or oppositional stance to global capital” which are absorbed through aestheticization and association. Like Matorin’s videos and prints “technological wonder stands in for mystical experience [producing] a shorthand for the desire and fantasy at the heart of spectacle".
Media
Schedule
from September 01, 2009 to November 30, 2009