About the Work

Sightings
2012 | Total Run Time: 10:54

Attie describes his process:

For Sightings, I created a video installation exploring the heightened moment of mutual encounter between art viewer and art object, between works of art and museum visitors and employees. I selected 40 objects from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and asked individuals to participate in a “dialogue” with a work of art, each taking an expressive gesture and gaze that embodied their emotional response to the art object… Slow-motion cinematography, frozen gestures, and an unseen moving stage comment on the active/passive quality of the interactions.

Sightings is the fruit of Shimon Attie’s residency at UVP in 2012. For this piece, Attie revisits and recontextualizes footage that was shot for a three channel piece originally created for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

For the UVP iteration, this source footage was radically re-edited into a single channel piece that emphasizes rhythm and dynamic tension between the viewer and the viewed. Orbiting like twin stars around a shared focus, the two punctually eclipse one another, occluding our own view and reminding us that we, too, are part of this dialogue. In the words of Serge Daney, “All form is a face looking at us”.

About the Artist

Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Shimon Attie has received international recognition for his installations that incorporate a variety of media including installation art, video, photography, performance, new media, and public art. His work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Jewish Museum, New York; and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, among many others. The artist has lived and worked in New York City since 1997.

To learn more about Attie’s work, visit the artist’s website: shimonattie.net

Sponsors

This exhibition was supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.