Noah Klersfeld “Pillow”

Arts + Leisure

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Arts+Leisure presents Noah Klersfeld’s first project at the gallery, Pillow. Working with surface and depth, color and light, timing and rhythm, Klersfeld creates textural videos, harmonizing multiple time frames that are bound within predetermined structural forms.

The five videos in the exhibition reference five programs – Family Ties, Good Times, Who’s the Boss?, All in The Family, and The Facts of Life – with each episode portraying a death in the family. Filmed in the dark, each video shows a close-up of a white, wool pillow that is colored by the light emanating from a television set playing a domestic sitcom from the year 1986. For this series of works, the artist was inspired by the daily ritual of watching TV with his family as a child while his parents were going through a divorce. As Klersfeld describes it, “While we were physically near each other, emotionally we couldn’t have been further apart.” Temporally reconfigured, each video weaves together colors from different scenes into a single frame. The combination of colors is matched by the layered audio that collapses the laugh tracks onto more somber moments of personal reflection.

The exhibition installation will feature two U-shaped benches that frame the interactions between the viewers and the work, the viewers and the space, and the viewers with each other. The bench design creates a variety of viewing angles for the work, as well as voids in their centers that signify absence and isolate people’s attention by having them sit together while facing in different directions. The void can be activated, however, depending on how viewers choose to interact with the structure.

Klersfeld’s work utilizes a complex cutting and layering technique that allows him to bind the surface of the image with the infinite depths of on-screen activity, placing time at the center of his material investigations. Focusing on the video plane, he is developing what he terms an “operational aesthetic,” challenging realistic still imagery through temporal forms of abstraction.

Noah Klersfeld is a video artist and architect living and working in New York City, where he currently is a resident artist at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. He earned his BFA and BARCH degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design. His exhibitions and screenings include The Montclair Art Museum (NJ), The Hunterdon Art Museum (NJ), The San Diego Art Institute (CA), The Islip Art Museum (NY), The Museum of Contemporary Photography (IL), The Bronx Museum of The Arts (NY), and The Center on Contemporary Art (WA). He recently completed a long-term video installation at The Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) with collaborator Patty Chang and has installed public works in the Toronto subway system (TCC), The Calgary International Airport (YYC), and on the Manhattan Bridge (NY). Noah is a 2016 recipient of the Peter S Reed Foundation grant and his work is in a new book, Media Art and The Urban Environment: Engendering Public Engagement with Urban Ecology.