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Galleries
· Bleu Acier
· Greene Contemporary
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By Suzie Walshe
Voshardt and Humphrey's common ground is the formation of visual arts and their development of open structures, unique images and fresh ways of working with the media. By recycling different kinds of ideologies, imagery, software and materials, Voshardt and Humphrey rethink contemporary utopias with new tools for visual production. The process results in everything from deep critical reflection to dark humour.
This type of work comes at an interesting point in the history of film. After fighting to be given credible art-world status despite its mechanical nature, work of this kind is now being celebrated for its evidentiary role and the extent to which it questions the sense of reality in constructed representations.
Robyn Voshardt / Sven Humphrey have worked collaboratively in video, photography and drawing since they met at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They have created a body of deliciously subversive work centred on film, print and drawing exploring a broad range of issues from eco-psychology and power structures to cultural boundaries and identity politics. Language, with its many intricacies and diversions, is an essential part of their artistic practices and integral to a measured investigation of their work.
This can be seen primarily in the work New and Improved. The film shows a frenzied flash-card script of self-improvement and positive thinking like, "I can stop assuming the worst is bound to happen."
The thoughts / actions / directions flash by as if subliminal.
The video is a kind of visual play, carried out in several acts where there is neither a climax nor a dramatic denouement, stopping the same way it starts: right in the middle of a thought or feeling. The details and reflections are touching because they're universal, as a viewer, one can identify with many of them, giving the work an instant and lasting affect.
Exhibitions and screenings of their work include the V/07 Videoart Fair in Venice, Italy; DiVA Streets at the DiVA 07 Fair in New York; MID_E Festival in Spain; Around the Coyote Festival in Chicago; VOYEUR Video Collective , Australia; Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Danforth Museum of Art , Massachusetts; Selby Gallery at Ringling School of Art & Design , John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art , Tampa Museum of Art , Bleu Acier , and Greene Contemporary in Florida.
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