Hudson (Show)Room Exhibition: Jessica Bronson

01.09.01

Jessica Bronson studied biochemistry at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
and received her MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Her work
has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
CA (1998, as the winner of the Citibank Emerging Artist Award); the Kemper Museum
of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO (2000); CRG Gallery in New York, NY (1998
and 2000); the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Bliss,
Pasadena, CA (1997); and the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (1996). Recent group
exhibitions include Shifting Ground: Transformed Views of the American Landscape at
the Henry Gallery in Seattle, WA (2000); Let's Entertain at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, MN and traveling to additional venues including the Pompidou, Paris
(2000); DRIVE, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand; and
Seamless, Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1998).

Jessica Bronson's video installations capture the ephemeral phenomena of the
everyday and reorder it into extraordinary proportions. An extensive knowledge of film
informs the artist's work, as does an engagement with natural and mediated experience.
Using original and stock film footage, Bronson's manipulations of image, time and sound
tend to mesmerize and sharpen the senses at the same time. Alluding to the conventional
notions of the sublime and to several film genres?westerns, documentaries, and science
fiction films?Panamint Tilt evokes the utopian ideal of the West and its unsettling yet
persistent relationship to technology.

Panamint Tilt is comprised of several parts. The title piece is a wandering
surveillance of the California desert near the Panamint Mountains magnified into two,
large-scale projections. Distorted by the use of a wide-angle lens, the landscape is
doubled, flipped and reversed into two mirror images that together form moving patterns
of color and form. Another element, a monitor diptych entitled doubled sunset, includes
alternate imagery from the same landscape, but fractures it into kaleidoscopic
proportions. Each work has a distinct electronic soundtrack that creates a symphonic and
random arrangement of abstract sounds. Each work may be somewhat disorienting in its
complexity yet is simultaneously calming in movement, which is set to the pace of
regular breathing. Finally, three light-jet prints (harmony, where about, and badwater)
accompany the exhibition and act as doppelgangers of the strange desertscape in the
video works.

Jessica Bronson: Panamint Tilt is organized by the Luckman Fine Arts Gallery,
California State University, Los Angeles and is accompanied by an illustrated brochure
with essays by Kemi Ilesanmi, Curatorial Assistant, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
MN; and Julie Joyce, Gallery Director, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State
University, Los Angeles.

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