detail from Julia Scher’s video, “Guard”
The third of White Box‘s planned nine weekly curated (RNC-oriented) shows opened tonight with a video and window installation by Julia Scher curated by Michael Rush.
Everything is on the outside of the gallery for these summer shows. This week the window reveals a real chain link fence topped with the ubiquitous razor wire, but this time everything is in pink, the whole threaded with a blue text welcoming the Republican National Convention to New York. The video installation next to the window is composed of two looped tapes (43 minutes total) each showing a solitary pink-uniformed security guard stationed, presumably, in front of a bank of monitors showing images of the viewer.
Scher has worked with surveillance issues for years. In 1991 she wrote, “The monitors of surveillance are the eyes of a social body gone berserk.” Today we cannot even imagine an escape from that insanity.
It’s a very good show. It’ll be there for only six more days, but the real surveillance is only getting started.
Watch What We Say
See this post from Joy Garnett on what Schroeder Romero is presenting in honor of the RNC convention. It looks…