Samuel Clagnaz &Tommy Hartung, digital video still from unidentified work.
Courtesy of CRG

CRG Open Video Series: DECAMERON
CRG Gallery – 535 W 22 St, New York NY
8pm 17 January 2008

The CRG Gallery's Open Video Series screening continues tonight with Decameron, curated by sculptor and video maker Yasue Maetake. Taking into consideration the eponymous 14th century Italian text to which the show's title refers, one might expect a screening of fragmented, pastiche narratives, and the press release seems to promise as much. The program features video artist Ronnie Bass, who exhibited a memorable narrative video in the 2006 Columbia MFA show on the longings and utopian ambitions of two computer store clerks and their manager, an interesting if spare representation of an alienated info-industry workforce, existentially confused and locked into a symbolic universe of cultish fantasy. Momoyo Torimitsu meanwhile often depicts modern desperation of a similar banality in her work. The artist is widely known for her realist kinetic sculptures of salarymen in business suits that crawl along the floor; her videos in the past have documented the robots crawling along public streets and busy urban centers. Tyler Coburn constructs short, digital video collages dense with figures populating utterly artificial landscapes. Peter Garfeld is known for his haunting photographs of crumbling, modest American houses falling from the sky and more recently completed his ambitious video debut: Deep Space 1, a three-channel triptych that shifts between views onto constructed sets, empty landscapes, and busy inferiors crowded with actors.