INDECISIVE MOMENT presents So the Day, a screening in collaboration with Pulp Legend. The videos included fall broadly under two correlated themes that are intertwined throughout the program: Identity and Perception. Gender and cultural identity is explored through the trope of role playing when Hello Kitty goes on a date with Mickey Mouse and when a football player sings a progressively more frenetic and distorted version of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair.” Other artists use the camera as a tool with which to create a coded language or a systematic way of perceiving the natural world and reconsidering it. An hd video, which has been processed through a custom patch and then regurgitated as an sd video, tells the story of how a sketch in a notebook triggers a search along the Gowanus where an imagined boat is made real; drawing the world as it seemingly draws itself. These artists, each in their own way, take a meditative stance to image making, employing rhythyms and patterns that distort the mundane. The cummulative effect of the screening acts as a mantra where the relationship between words, images, sounds, and their meaning shifts and transforms.
Collective Showing I, a video festival organized by Pulp Legend, is the first project in a series that brings a number of art collectives together in one show.
Indecisive Moment has been invited to curate a video screening. Pulp Legend is bringing together a bunch of DIY/ artist-run groups working with video and is asking each to curate an hour long program.
We’d love to see what you have been up to. Please send us links to any work(s) that you feel would work for a screening (rather than installation). We are in the preliminary stages and haven’t decided on a definite theme, so just send us whatever you’d like. Please nothing longer than ten minutes.
We are always interested in photographers who make videos or videos that are about photography. Please feel free to pass this e-mail onto other video artists and photographers.
The show is tentatively planned for mid-September at Brooklyn Fire Proof East so please be in touch as soon as possible.
INDECISIVE MOMENT was founded by artists Hyla Skopitz and Teresa Christiansen in 2009 with the intention of bringing video art to the public eye.
Teresa and Hyla received their MFAs in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard in May, 2008. Though trained as photographers, they both quickly began to incorporate video into their practice, as did many of their peers. As they both developed a serious interest in the medium of video, they decided to create a forum within which to dedicate to showing video, in perhaps unconventional means, on their own terms.
The name Indecisive Moment began as the title of the first screening organized in August 2009. The artists included were all photographers who also made video work. The screening sought to initiate a conversation; why does it seem to have become exceedingly difficult for artists to undertake a viable photographic practice unless making work which is in line with a more traditional photography or working in a manner that directly references past photographic masters? Why do many photographers see so much potential in video?
Henri Cartier-Bresson, considered the father of photojournalism and street photography, published his book The Decisive Moment in 1952. Originally a painter, he turned to photography after realizing the unique potential of the medium to freeze a moment. The decisive moment is the fraction of a second in which visual elements come together to express the essence of the event which is unfolding in front of the photographer’s lens and his or her abilitly to recognize its significance with a click of the shutter in that instant.
