Downtown, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Single Channel
O-Town HouseFelipe Romero Beltrán, Paul Stephen Benjamin, Cristine Brache, Jen DeNike, Max de Esteban, Kim Gordon, Anuar Maauad, Emeka Ogboh Efraín López in collaboration with Los Angeles-based O-Town House presents a satellite exhibition of the video exhibition Single Channel. Coinciding with Frieze week, this exhibition takes place in Los Angeles. We are witnessing the decoupling of the moving image from real-world referents on an unprecedented scale. The digital realms that have become essential to everyday human interactions are cluttered with algorithmically generated counterfeits of nature and culture. Over the course of eight weekly rotations, Single Channel presents eight international artists who demonstrate through their respective works the extent to which video determines, rather than documents, reality. The artists offer a variety of visual approaches, ranging from the faux-vintage fuzziness of Super 8 to the sterility of millennial camcorder footage and the hallucinatory hyperreality of contemporary digital imagery, evidencing how our understanding of history is shaped by the aesthetics of period-specific technologies. Through their unflinching engagement with forms of video both maligned (pornography, music videos, home movies) and malignant (surveillance and data mining), the artists reveal how we rely on moving images to formulate our collective concepts of what constitutes “real” sex, citizenship, and history—and how we determine which subjects are excluded from these categories.