Action Adventure

Premiere Screening: 8pm Sharp, Thursday, July 13, 2006

July 13 – August 13, 2006

CANADA, NYC

Organized by Melissa Brown, Josh Kline, and Michael Williams

Summer is here. Time to take a time-out from the high temperatures and humidity in an air-conditioned movie theater. Time to kick back and eat popcorn in the dark. Time to spend some quality time with slick multi-million-dollar Hollywood fantasies.

Action Adventure is a group video show in the spirit of the Hollywood Blockbuster. The major part of the project is a 90 minute-long curated program of video exploring the influence of the movies in videos made by artists. Cinema provides a momentary escape for billions of people from the ordinary difficulties of their lives. It is a mass-produced language of imagination and emotions universally understood in our culture. The artists in Action Adventure harness elements of the movies to tap into this system. They reuse, rearrange, or redeploy the ideas and strategies of Hollywood in the service of art-making. 

Jim Drain, Jocelyn Shipley, and Antoine Catala hijack cliché movie genres by creating absurdist parodies. Ryan Trecartin takes the narrative and edits it into something new and radical. Shana Moulton, Paper Rad and Scott Reeder create vivid character-driven stories. Stina Wirfelt and Tim Etchells take on the stars. Abbey Williams pays homage to Kenneth Anger by doing a remake. Rachel Mason, Marie Lorenz, and Lan Tuazon perform daring and dangerous deeds and document them. Tanyth Berkeley turns the camera on the audience and experiments with slow-motion excitement. Jeremiah Clancy, Julie Orser, Alistair Banks Griffin, and Cate Snook create moments of abstracted cinematic beauty. Chris Moukarbel takes bootlegging a little too far. Trevor Shimizu‘s text-based video catapults a 1909 manifesto into the future. Finally, Siebren Versteeg supplies closing credits drawn from a live internet-feed of obituaries.

Beyond the video program, Action Adventure experiments with the presentation of video within the gallery context. For one month, CANADA’s gallery will become a theatrical environment, creating a space that will encourage the visitor to stay and spend significant time watching videos. The installation will include a concession stand where popcorn, candy, and an assortment of refreshments will be available for purchase. CANADA will also be air conditioned for the duration of the show. On the opening night of the exhibition, Thursday, July 13th, a premiere screening will take place at 8pm. 

For more information about this project:  [email protected] or [email protected] or www.canadanewyork.com