| Type / Subtype: | Exhibition / Live Automated Video Work | | Exhibition date: | 05/09/03 - 19/10/03 | | Description: | FACT presents the first UK solo exhibition by the Brooklyn-based artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.
Over the past decade the McCoys have produced a number of outstanding multimedia projects that explore the intersection of television, film, narrative and computer databases.
The title of the exhibition, Robot Films, refers to the role that automata and machines play in both the production and experience of the work and is most visible in Soft Rains (2003), the project that the artists have specifically produced for Gallery 1 at FACT. Soft Rains combines miniature movie sets, surveillance cameras, and switching systems, allowing viewers to observe a film and its production in it's entirety. The mini-stories are the projected onto a large screen in random sequences. The McCoys liken the experience to a visit to Universal Studios, the theme park that helped promote our fascination with the meta-narratives of the filmmaking process. However, while Universal Studios elevates filmmaking to heroic proportions, the McCoys shrink the enterprise. Each mini-film is based on a particular genre, ranging from thriller to romance to comedy. The resulting miniature movies and sets highlight out culture's fascination with the storytelling process, revealing the mechanisms and artifice behind the magic of cinema.
Two recently produced projected film works will be presented in Gallery 2. In The Kiss (2002) the McCoys recreate a scene based on the famous kiss between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981). In Horror Chase (2002) the artists meticulously reconstruct the mountain cabin set used by Sam Raimi in his horror classic Evil Dead 2 (1984) with the actor (Adrian Latourette) perpetually pursued by an unseen assailant. A computer housed in a suitcase and visible to the viewer controls the images by making decisions about how the sequence proceeds. Therefore, unlike traditional film narrative, these moments do not resolve themselves but are eternally suspended, reversed, stuttered, and repeated. The resolution of the story only comes about in our imagination. | | Description Source: | FACT brochure | | Description Source Date: | August - September 2003 |
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