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.

Carolee Schneemann (born 1939), who blazed a trail for body art through her performances, videos, films, and installations, will be represented here with a selection of photographs from her influential 1960s works, some of which have never before been exhibited. While Schneemann’s early work prefigured feminist concerns regarding the body and societal taboos, her still images remain a vivid testament to the visceral energy of her groundbreaking nude performances and actions. Throughout a career that now spans four decades, the artist continues to advance ideas and images that are psychologically powerful and provocative.

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Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) is internationally known for her work as an African American artist who recasts conventions of the documentary image to explore issues of race, class, and gender. In “Sited for Record,” a recent project commissioned by the Beacon Cultural Foundation, Weems employs documentary methods to investigate the changing landscape and shifting racial demographics of Beacon, New York, as it transforms from depressed, post-industrial city to burgeoning cultural destination. While Weems’s original project also features video and sound installations, this exhibition will focus on a single video and selected photographs that include images of Beacon’s Main Street, the waterfront, area arts institutions, and prisons. Dressed in black, barefoot, and with her back to the camera, the artist appears in some photos; whether standing before a Gothic Revival building or the minimalist compound of Dia Beacon, she has the appearance of an otherworldly apparition or displaced person who surveys a strange land.

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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.