The Desert Loops, 2005 4-channel video/audio installation, color video w/ Dolby 5.1 Surround audio on DVD, projectors, LCD screen Running time: (4) Continuous loops
The Desert Loops re-visions footage from classic desert war films, focusing on the desert landscapes which form the backdrops for war and empire past and present.
Utilizing twenty-eight seconds of media, seamlessly looped on three projections and one LCD flat-panel monitor, the work borrows from several classic films where the desert landscape doubles as military theater for conflicts including World Wars 1 and 2. The films are sampled and modified (in some cases frame-by-frame) to rebuild the cracked, windswept landscapes resulting in the hypnotic and elegiac Desert Loops. The narrative context, romance and mythology of the original films are discarded in favor of both literal and allegorical presentation--and a clear allusion to the current conflicts in the Middle East.
Presented as a series of video loops picturing a stark, ominous and desolate landscape, The Desert Loops create a space for contemplation of conflict and history, while deconstructing Cinematic conventions and modes of representation.
The Desert Loops, 2005 Composite installation view
The Desert Loops, 2005 Video documentation and clips
Cosmic Microwave Background with New Humans, or Interstellar Communication Breakdown, 2005 In collaboration with New Humans multi-channel video/audio installation with live performance, LCD projector, monitors, reflective mylar
Cosmic Microwave Background...was produced in collaboration with Brooklyn-based sound/installation artists New Humans for performances at Apexart and PS1 Contemporary Art Center (NYC).
The installation and performance creates an immersive environment sculpted from white noise and manipulated television static. Using a variety of electronically manipulated instruments, New Humans create a continuously undulating wall of sound inspired by radio static and television noise--familiar sounds that result from the emanation of microwave radiation permeating the Cosmos. Videos simultaneously play on stacked monitors and projections, all reflected in a silver mylar covered floor and walls. Television static is manipulated in very subtle, kaleidoscopic forms, and complex static-filled mattes created from classic Hollywood science-fiction films hover on the threshold of perceptibility. Just as sonic patterns slowly emerge from the dense soundscape, what first appears as common television static, reveals itself to be more upon careful observation.
COCKED, 2003 (from the ReVisionist Cinema series) Color video w/audio on DVD for projection or multi-channel monitor installation Running time: 10:00
Produced during the peak of international debate regarding the United States’ initiative to invade Iraq, COCKED is an anti-war statement in the guise of a minimalist Western, borrowing dozens of short segments from several Cinema classics of the genre.
COCKED expands and sustains what is usually a brief, tense, cinematic moment--the showdown--and implodes the quintessential American mythology of the Western by denying the redemption of its protagonists through acts of violence. As this extended psychodrama plays out, the classic desert panorama characteristic of the Western’s cinematic space is collapsed into a metaphoric psychological space, where every gesture, glance and posture, communicate a mixture of aggression and fear, and nothing is resolved
Cocked, 2003 Video excerpt
Installation view from ReVisionist Cinema / Triple Feature, 2004
The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), 2007 Potted plants, fogger, live video feed, DVD, video mixer, rear-screen video projection, LCD monitor
Installation view of window-projection at ICA, Philadelphia. Produced in conjunction with LURE Project's Sweet Green Hangout for the exhibition Locally Localized Gravity
Based on Douglas Trumbull's 1972 eco-sci-fi classic, "Silent Running", The Last Garden extends the original film's narrative in which the last surviving forest of Earth, preserved aboard Spaceship Valley Forge, is left in the hands of a single robot programmed to care for it.
In The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), animated footage of this robot is mixed in real-time with a live-video-feed of a small garden located nearby in the gallery, creating a scene where the robot appears to be tending the garden. Whether the garden will survive or not will become clear over the course of the exhibition. As the work is projected on the ICA's windows each evening over the duration of the exhibition, LURE's greenhouse (Sweet Green Hangout) and the ICA itself will be transformed into Spaceship Valley Forge, posing questions about the fragility of our environment, and the delicate relationship between Man and Nature.
The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), 2007 Installation documentation
The Last Garden (in Memory of Freeman Lowell), 2007 Video stills (with live feed)
Philadelphia-based artist Matthew Suib has exhibited installations, video and audio works and photographs internationally at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kunstwerke Berlin, Mercer Union (Toronto), The Corcoran Gallery of Art (D.C.) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center (NYC). His most recent exhibitions include Locally Localized Gravity at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and the 2007 Moscow Biennale.
In 2007, Suib co-founded Screening, along with artist Nadia Hironaka. Screening is Philadelphia’s first gallery dedicated to the presentation of innovative and challenging works on video and film. Screening is a project devoted to expanding access to these media and exploring ways that moving image culture influences our understanding and experience of the world.
Suib is also a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow, and a member of the Philadelphia artist collective Vox Populi, where he has exhibited since 2001.
Contact: msuib@hotmail.com
