Premise:
Urban Exquis is inspired both by the cadavre exquis method of poetry, in which a collection of writers blindly contribute isolated words that together compose a poem, and by Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 film City Slivers, in which the artist depicts New York City through a collection of masked views that fill only a portion of the film frame. Urban Exquis consists of twenty-four short videos that depict various urban environments. Like the word fragments in a cadaver exquis, each video is composed by a different moviemaker, artist, or architect. Like the images in City Slivers, each video is a vertically-oriented fragment of a conventional video frame that defies the conventional widescreen format of cinema. In both method and form, the installation challenges many assumptions regarding the relevance of cinematic imagery to urban space. Urban Exquis suggests that the identity of the city resides in simultaneity and adjacency, not in spatial and temporal unity. Like the city itself, it cannot be understood as a singular vision. It is fragmentary, elusive, frustrating, and (ultimately) beautiful in a way that eludes intention.
Format:
Participation is open to a wide range of individuals, from professional moviemakers to amateur camera-phone operators. The installation consists of four HD video images, which are projected onto the party-wall of a tenement building within First Street Green in order to form a single and continuous image. The approximate dimensions of the image are 50’ x 7’. Individual videos by contributors occupy a sliver of this overall image.
Complete specifications and application procedures and submission requirements are available at http://firststreetgreenpark.org/. Please submit a statement of interest to Thomas Forget via email: [email protected]. You will receive more information in reply.
Images and information on Gordon Matta-Clark’s City Slivers:
http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_slivers.html
http://www.eai.org/publicProgramArtists.htm?id=163
http://www.eai.org/program_photos/12_01_highline/12_01_highline.html
