Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition In Conversation from June 26 to August 30 at their architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade.

In Conversation is new work created by Courtney Rile. This work explores the moving image and our human relationship to technology through the language of the canon of video art.

In Conversation

2025 

In the early 1970s, Syracuse was a center of innovation — the Everson Museum hired one of the first curators of video art and hosted seminal media artists from around the world. At the same time, Synapse, an experimental media collective at Syracuse University, provided fertile ground for explorations of this new technology as both art form and revolutionary tool of communication.

In Conversation is a dialogue with the work of Bill Viola, Shigeko Kubota, and Peter Campus, all of whom exhibited at the Everson Museum in the early 70s. Structured in a series of modules that function like musical movements or songs on an album, motifs recur throughout In Conversation: reflections, the distortion of time, video as an extension of self, and video as an observational tool, exploring the individual, intimate experience of video as a way to see ourselves from another perspective or in another time, a step beyond the present tense of the mirror. These explorations, which trace their lineage to the earliest days of video art, are more relevant than ever in today’s world, a world in which audiovisual technologies have become integral to nearly every facet of our lives.