The 59th Minute

ARTISTS

JEREMY BLAKE

Creative Time and Panasonic proudly present new work by acclaimed New York-based artist Jeremy Blake in The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Times Square Astrovision, July 1 – September 30, 2003. In the heart of Times Square, the ravishing abstractions of Blake’s new work, Cowboy Waltz (2003), a triptych of one-minute videos, will starkly contrast the ubiquitous and often blunt product placements in the world’s media capital. Starting July 1 through September 30th, in conjunction with the Cowboy Waltz installation on the NBC Astrovision by Panasonic, a selection of the artist’s video works will be on view in Jeremy Blake: Moving Pictures at The American Museum of the Moving Image, Long Island City, Queens.

Cowboy Waltz is rooted in the architecture and mythology of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, an eccentric gothic mansion of firearms heiress, Sara Winchester. Blending the legend of the mansion (the widow believed that her home was haunted by victims of Winchester firearms), historic 16-millimeter photographs, and the artist’s florid ink drawings and animated imagery, Blake’s Cowboy Waltz is a dreamlike environment drench in pathos.

Cowboy Waltz starts outside the mansion and ends in an interior, psychological realm. Starting with the witches’ caps of the mansion, the camera moves out of the sunlight and inside the house. Subsumed in sensuous blue, a white, biomorphic form glows inside, slowly opens into a hole, and mutates into lurid and woozy zones of saturated color that resemble stains and watermarks, drip paintings, surrealism, psychedelia, and Rorschach inkblots.

In the mediapolis of Times Square, Blake’s bleeding drawings and shifting scrims of color reflect the recesses of our mind as we reel from the environment’s sensorial bombardment. Jeremy Blake’s work is featured in such prestigious permanent collections as the Whitney Museum of American Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

On September 25th, 2003 there will be a public dialogue at The American Museum of the Moving Image between Jeremy Blake and Carl Goodman, Curator of Digital Media featuring an audiovisual presentation, www.ammi.org.

Cowboy Waltz
March 1 - May 30, 2002