Conrad Ventur
Over the Long Haul
Galleria 1/9unosunove is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition in Italy by American artist Conrad Ventur (1977, Seattle).
Ventur’s artistic research is concerned with re-performance, quotation, memory and nostalgia, using archives and new media to demonstrate change over time. On the occasion of Over the Long Haul Ventur will be showing his completed volume of recordings from Screen Tests Revisited: between 2009 and 2011, Ventur re-created thirteen of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests from the 1960s’ using the original ‘Factory’ subjects such as the poet John Giorno, actress Mary Woronov, writer Taylor Mead and legendary underground film star Mario Montez. Ventur videotaped living Screen Tests subjects in the same manner as the originals created forty-five years ago: black and white, silent, playback slowed-down, 4 minutes in length. Formally, the sitters exude a candid familiarity with Ventur, suggesting a conspiratorial undoing of the youth-obsessed ground on which popular culture stands. For Ventur, the past and present intermingle in a filmic narrative that connects decades just as it reanimates our own particular links with popular culture and shared societal memories radiating with light.
At the invitation of curator Klaus Biesenbach, in January 2011 Ventur created a performance piece that involved three video cameras, three massive video projectors, and a cast of 300 people who came to MoMA’s Marron Atrium to sit for their very own video portrait recording, which was then projected in real-time on the walls of the museum and then uploaded to the MoMA website: demonstrating the concept of ‘fame for everyone for 15 minutes’, but using the accelerated technology of today.
Also on view is a unique piece that Ventur faxed to the gallery with instructions as to how it should be printed and displayed. The quote, Nothing is New Except What Has Been Forgotten, attributed to French aristocrat Marie Antoinette, has been faxed to the gallery, each letter to a page and printed on acid-free paper. This process of transmission and production of the work, initiates a conversation about the exchange of value between the artist from abroad and the gallery in Rome and our perception of the past in relation to what is seen as new. Here the gallery is both collaborator and producer. The technology of transmission creates the work.
For any further information please contact:
gallery@unosunove.com