FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:


Continuous Play
September 5 – 28, 2002


Luhring Augustine is proud to present Continuous Play, an exhibition of six video installations, including new work by Janine Antoni, Reinhard Mucha, Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton, Pipilotti Rist and Anri Sala. The show will also include Rocky, Paul McCarthy's 1976 performance, which was recently re-mastered on DVD.
In 1976 when consumer video cameras were available for the first time, Paul McCarthy set one up on his kitchen table and filmed himself punching himself in the head for 45 minutes. Since then Rocky and other works from this early era of performance have not only influenced the history of performance art and the development of video as a viable means of documentation and presentation, but ultimately encouraged the development of video as a medium in its own right.
Video is becoming an increasingly common and technically advanced medium in contemporary art. As the technology ages, artists are creating videos with more diversity and skill than ever before. Each video in this exhibition is installed so as to highlight the sculptural aspect of the work, and move the medium beyond its traditional two dimensional and single channel video format.
Pipilotti Rist seamlessly uses two projectors to create a painterly meditation on architecture. The roving camera work of the first projection is mimicked by a second projection that physically moves in patterns across the wall. Rist is concurrently showing video works at MOMA Queens in Tempo and at the Guggenheim in the exhibition Moving Pictures. Rist has realized many important exhibitions over the last several years: Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Kunsthalle Vienna, Kunsthalle Zürich, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Anri Sala was born in Albania and lives and works in Paris. His video Naturalmystic (tomahawk #2) was shown in the 2002, Sao Paulo Biennial. He won the young artist prize at the 2001 Venice Biennial and was short listed for the 2002 Hugo Boss Prize.
Jenny Gage is a photographer and filmmaker who has collaborated with Tom Betterton on several projects including 3 short films, Elegy, Drift, and After School Special that have been shown internationally. She will also screen Elegy at the Virginia Film Festival in October.
Janine Antoni's large projection depicts the artist tightrope walking along the horizon line of a beach in her home town in the Bahamas. Antoni creates an interesting tension by performing the stressful action of the tightrope walk over the bucolic environment of the rolling waves. Conversely, the rhythm of the waves create a movement that is at once soothing and distracting as it throws off the balance of the tightrope walker. Antoni has exhibited extensively and her work is included in numerous permanent museum collections such as, the Boijmans Van Beunigen Museum, Rotterdam; Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco MOMA, and MOMA, New York. She has been the recipient of the Irish Museum of Modern Art/ Glen Dimplex Award and Joan Mitchell Foundation Award as well as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. Antoni currently has pieces on exhibition at MOMA Queens, The Whitney, the Guggenheim, and a solo show of her work will open at Site Santa Fe at the end of September.
Reinhard Mucha incorporates video into his traditional form of the vitrine. This new sculpture contains two studio monitors that depict Mucha's graduate school thesis performance filmed from the original documentation photographs. The various signifiers in the vitrine come together as a multi level commentary on the artist's youth, art school, and german bureacracy.
Mucha recently opened a major installation at the new K21 Kunstsammlung Nordhein - Westfalen im Ständehaus in Dusseldorf, Germany, which is currently on view. His work is in the collections of museums throughout the world including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Tate Gallery, London, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

For more information please contact Claudia Altman-Siegel or Natalia Mager, at 212 206 9100 or look on our website www.luhringaugustine.com.