Performing Still Images: David Claerbout and Matthew Buckingham

Performing Still Images looks at two distinct ways of addressing the relationship between different media: photography and video in David Claerbout’s “The American Room” and photography as a time-based practice in Matthew Buckingham’s work, “Image of Absalon Projected Until it Vanishes”. Both artists base their projections on still images—Claerbout on thousands of still images portraying an audience in a musical performance and classical setting, and Buckingham on the slow, cinematic, fade-to-white of a projected slide image. Both artists deal with the memory of a past in ways that evoke sentiments as well as new ways of dissolving our culture of representation.

The third season of UMMA’s new media exhibitions, guest curated by Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will focus on the notion of performativity in contemporary art. Performing Still Images: David Claerbout and Matthew Buckingham will be the first of three exhibitions presented in the upcoming season.