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The Jack Tilton Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photography, video, and film by artists Carolee Schneemann, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jenny Perlin. Bringing together selected works dating from the 1960s to the present, the show traces a trajectory of artistic practice that moves from the artist’s body boldly featured inside the frame to the seemingly self-effacing interventions performed off-camera. The exhibition will be on view throughout the gallery’s two floors from September 21 through October 29. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, September 21, from 6 top 8 pm. This is the second exhibition in the Jack Tilton Gallery’s new space on the Upper East Side.
Unlike Weems and Schneemann, Jenny Perlin (born 1970) stays outside of the frame while calling attention to the artist’s hand. She uses drawing, film, and video to create idiosyncratic documentaries relating to social, cultural, and personal histories. In a series of wry animations shown here, the Brooklyn-based artist combines 16mm film and traditional stop-motion technique to build narratives that feature her labor-intensive, handmade drawings. Images that range from Rorschach tests to immigration papers—tools used to determine one’s true identity—are arbitrarily riddled with the media’s quaint imperfections of jumpy lines and jittery movements. In Sight Reading, a seven-minute, three-channel video installation, Perlin pays tribute to artistic blunders and manual missteps. The piece commences as a documentary simultaneously recording three professional pianists performing a Schumann concerto for the first time. However, if an individual pianist makes a mistake, his or her projection fades to black for five seconds then resumes. As accidents accumulate over time, the three pianists fall out of synch, transforming the virtuoso masterpiece into a cacophony of earnest mistakes.
