Jeremy Blake, Mod Lang, 2001
digital video with sound, 16 min, continuous loop
courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York
Jeremy Blake, Winchester Redux, 2004
digital video with sound, 5 min, continuous loop
courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York
Jeremy Blake received recognition for his innovative work in the late 1990s merging traditional painting techniques with new digital means that produced works of arresting visual elegance. Drawing from history, popular culture, biography, and fiction, Blake constructs metaphors of architectural spaces and profiles of cultural representation through non-linear, abstract, digital videos. Continuing the practice of changing content throughout the run of an exhibition, BMoCA will present two works by the artist at different times.
With flowing hues of radiant colors that drip and morph with psychedelic suppleness, Mod Lang (2001) evokes the hallucinatory aesthetic of 1960s fashionable cosmopolitanism. Here, the hard-edge abstractions and color field paintings of mid-century modern post-painterly abstraction come to life as our eyes follow the pouring colors, translucent overlaps, and changing shapes.
Winchester Redux (2004) is inspired by Blake’s interest in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California – a bizarre mansion Sarah Winchester, heiress to the estate and legacy of the Winchester rifle, continuously built and remodeled in an attempt to rid herself of the haunting responsibilities of her family’s invention. Shifting between representational imagery and animated abstraction, Blake induces the tension of reality against imagination as a portrayal of the inability to escape the past while longing for solace through spiritual renewal.
Jeremy Blake, born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1971, lived in Los Angeles and New York City, where he resided at the time of his death in 2007. He received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1995. Blake was selected for the Whitney Biennial in 2000, 2002, and 2004 and his work is in many permanent collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Visual Rhythm has been made possible by Presenting Sponsor Mike’s Camera and by a partnership with the Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.With additional support from Sue Cannon, Polly and Mark Addison, Boulder County Arts Alliance, the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Hotel Boulderado.
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