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The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers: 2.6 Jordan WolfsonPost an Event »

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

February 3 - March 1, 2009

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360 Kansas Street San Francisco, CA 94103
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The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers: 2.6 Jordan Wolfson Jordan Wolfson, Perfect Lover, 2007. Digital animation transferred to 16-millimeter film, color, sou
The New York-based artist Jordan Wolfson's films and installations often combine strategies of classic conceptualism with an exploration of personal experiences, emotions, and a poetic sense of potentiality. The artist frequently plays with ideas of repetition and makes digitally animated films that are then transferred onto 16mm film. In Wolfson's piece Dreaming of the dream of the dream (2004), a 16mm film is looped endlessly until the film stock is destroyed. Once the film has completely worn out it will never be remade. The single copy of the film is comprised of hundreds of clips from animated cartoons depicting water—whether the ocean, a river, even a rainstorm—symbols of life and its temporality. In the work included in the Passengers exhibition, Perfect Lover (2007), a realistically animated crow marks the hours of the day in a human voice. Wolfson's film is a meditation on mortality and the passage of time with an unmistakable reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), two wall clocks that are initially set to the same time and inevitably fall out of sync with each other. The crow is often characterized as a bad omen or a signal of coming change, and this film relates to an untitled work the artist created for the 2006 Whitney Biennial in which he attempted to manufacture an omen by luring crows, with an audio recording of their calls, to the top of the museum.