on view: April 19 - may 11, 2025
opening reception: sat., april 19, 5:30-8pm
closing reception: sun., may 11, 3:30-6:30pm
There will be a performance by Douglas Dunn + Dancers at the exhibition’s closing reception.
The work is centered around the paradoxical and somewhat absurd, if not disturbing, notion that there was once a moving image medium in which images were recorded and preserved for playback on an extremely flimsy ribbon of mylar coated with a fine grain of iron oxide – otherwise known as rust. The VHS (Video Home System) tape was in essence already obsolete by the time it hit the market. “Planned obsolescence” was its modus operandi, though not exactly in some foreseeable afterlife of the medium but precisely at the very moment of its consumption, typically in the living room. We imagine ourselves at the receiving end of this circuit long after the materials have expired via their arbitrary decommission and replaced by newer ones, and discovering ways to reinvent the wheel so to speak.
- Gibson + Recoder, Kinoki (2025)
Gibson + Recoder have always walked a high-risk high-reward tightrope throughout their career as they plumbed the raw materials of cinema–projector, film, light, electricity–to create elastic and challenging works and installations. Recently, they have focused their interest in discarded, obsolete, and/or forgotten cinematic media on the cast-offs from the dawn of late 1970’s home theater–the VHS cassette. They approach this once ubiquitous object with the cold eye of the amateur scientist, cracking open the cassette to sleuth out the secret inner life it might contain. And the result is an array of metaphorically rich, poetically charged, intellectually rigorous, and visually compelling drawings, collages, and both static and kinetic sculptures.
What is actually inside a VHS cassette is fairly banal stuff: an iron oxide-coated magnetic Mylar tape tightly wound around two plastic spools and various other plastic parts. Utterly disposable. Focusing their attention on the Mylar tape, Gibson + Recoder poke and prod this moribund material like alchemists to see if it can be revivified and transformed into something beyond itself. Once freed from its existence as mere cog in a machine–as a medium for transporting and disseminating information–what surprising new energies, narratives, and riddles does this tape contain?
Gibson + Recoder’s approach to their newfound material runs the gamut from sensual–almost loving–to clinical, while welcome touches of humor and absurdity provide entry points into their conceptual enigmas. The tension between old source material and reimagined artwork is palpable and bracing.
- Brice Brown (artist, writer & curator)
Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have exhibited their expanded cinema installations and performances at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Mad. Sq. Art, REDCAT, Wexner Center for the Arts, National Gallery of Art, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, Performa 09, Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Conversations at the Edge, Walter and McBean Galleries, Memorial Art Gallery, Young Projects Gallery, Robischon Gallery, Nancy Margolis Gallery, Microscope Gallery, I-Park Foundation, Exploratorium, Morris-Jumel Mansion, Sundance Film Festival, Milton Art Bank, Artefact Festival, BOZAR, M HKA, Museum Kunstpalace Düsseldorf, HMKV, RIXC, Viennale, Austrian Film Museum, Metro Kinokulturhaus, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, TENT, Sonic Acts, XPERIMENTA, La Casa Encendida, Serralves Foundation, Museu do Chiado, Atelier Impopulaire, Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática, and EYE Film Museum. They live and work in New York.
gibsonrecoder.com
