The 59th Minute

ARTISTS

Janaina TSCHAPE, Hiraki SAWA & THE NEISTAT brothers

In celebration of the third anniversary of The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Times Square Astrovision, Creative Time and Panasonic proudly present three videos by emerging artists. Blending reality and fiction, Dream Sequence I (Janaina Tschape), Mousetrap (The Neistat Brothers), and Dwelling (Hiraki Sawa) recast everyday objects – a bed, a mousetrap, and an airplane – with a dreamlike and absurdist spirit.

Having once said “something can become a sculpture with an action,” for the duration of her minute-long work Janaina Tschape “gives time a shape.” From the center of an unmade bed in an outdoor courtyard, a large, white bubble emerges slowly and suddenly bursts, as if a secret can no longer be contained. Culminating in a sublime release, Dream Sequence I suggests a mysterious but vital inner life.

Mousetrap by The Neistat Brothers features a white mouse, tempting fate as it paces around a plywood mousetrap. Citing Hemingway’s Iceberg Principle as inspiration – whereby the naked eye can only see a small portion of known truth – The Neistat Brothers use a playful yet macabre conceit to throw our cultural fascination with death back in our faces.

Finally, Hiraki Sawa’s Dwelling takes a generic apartment and creates a daydream universe of toy-sized jumbo jets, slowly taking off from pillows, tabletops, and carpets. Flying between rooms and past dangling light bulbs, Sawa brings the otherwise imposing machines into captivity. The containment and displacement of the planes is, in itself, transporting.

Tschape, The Neistat Brothers, and Sawa’s fantastical transformation of domestic environments and banal objects inspire “jouissance,” the French term coined by Roland Barthes to characterize the moment when readers abandon themselves between the act of reading and the narrative; we can lost ourselves in these three videos.

Public opening with Kid America at Marquee (289 10th Ave at 26th St) on January 21 2004, 9 p.m

Hiraki Sawa, Dwelling
The Neistat brothers, Mousetrap
Janaina Tschape, Dream Sequence I

January 21 - June 24, 2004