Purified by Fire, 2006 Multi-channel video/audio installation:
Using the language and iconography of cinema as building blocks, Purified by Fire constructs an anti-mythic framework from which to reexamine social attitudes towards war, violence and morality.
Comprised of seamless video loops constructed from just a few seconds of iconic cinematic imagery and commercially available special effect stock footage, the individual works in the exhibition challenge the physical and moral gap that separates Westerners, and specifically Americans, from war and destruction.
Expanding on the artist’s previous investigations of Cinema as mythology, the work examines the mythos underlying an American mindset which demonizes foes, sanctions oppression, elevates militarism to a national value and facilitates a distinctly American notion of regeneration through violence.
Purified by Fire, 2006 Multi-channel video projection on gallery windows, created from commercially available special-effects stock footage Continous loop
Purified by Fire, 2006 Composite installation view
Purified by Fire (Perpetual Explosion), 2006 Color video projection with audio, (sound: Henry Flynt, Purified by the Fire, 1983)
Continuous loop created from commercially available special-effects stock footage
Left: Purified by Fire (Trench), 2006 Color video with audio on LCD monitor, Continuous loop
Right: Purified by Fire (Bunker), 2006 Color video with audio on LCD monitor, Continuous loop
Scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket were reconstructed as seamless loops, picturing both sides of the conflict scanning the same burning cityscape (from different points of view) . These scenes, representing Vietnam, filmed on the outskirts of London, and resembling real everyday images from present-day Iraq, create a matrix of myth and history. In this reconstructed cityscape, the smoldering structures become eternal flames and military conflict is reconsidered as a single historical continuum.
These scenes are transposed, via window-projections, onto the physical cityscape in Purified by Fire (pictured in the first post).
Purified By Fire, 2006 Video documentation and clips
Purified By Fire, 2006 Video projections on cargo van windows Installation view at PhotoMiami, Dec. 2007
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
