Ben Russell: 12 x 12
@ Museum of Contemporary Art
220 E Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60611
On view through Monday, September 27th
Ben Russell is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, ethnography, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences that reveal an ongoing concern with communal spectatorship and ritualistic performance.
For his UBS 12 x 12 exhibition, Russell presents a site-specific installation of the most recent installment of Trypps, a series of seven films that the artist describes as “an ongoing study in trance, travel and psychedelic ethnography.” Trypps #7 (Badlands) (2010) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.
The exhibition is augmented by a series of related film screenings throughout the month of September, and by a live, collaborative expanded cinema performance by Russell and Chicago artist Joe Grimm.
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