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Johansson Projects

May 9 - June 21, 2009

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2300 Telegraph Avenue Oakland, CA 94612
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Show Me Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Artists Talks
In the upcoming exhibition Show Me, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy continue their exploration and construction of physical and conceptual models using found objects, miniature model sets and video media. The Second Gallery will be transformed into an immersive environment investigating the arbitrary nature of systems of categorization and the possibilities that lie within obsolete technologies to examine reality. New works by the collaborative duo include the multimedia project Artists Talks and an installation work entitled Video Inversion, shown here for the first time. For their earliest projects, such as Every Shot, Every Episode (2001), the McCoys exhaustively logged hundreds of hours of footage of the 1970s television show “Starsky & Hutch” into subcategories that they developed based on theme, action, or filmmaking technique. By restructuring the footage, the McCoy’s extracted narrative meaning and repackaged it into arbitrary themes of sameness. The distinctly non-linear results were satisfyingly comic and complex. In later projects the duo turned to creating unsettling fantasy worlds through elaborately built miniature film sets. Our Second Date (2004), for example, features tiny sculpted figures of Jennifer and Kevin watching a pocket-sized movie screen with live video of reconstructed scene from Jean-Luc Goddard’s film Weekend. Here the incorporation of a simplistic model-train set and figurines with a sophisticated ontological query yields a beautifully sculptural and conceptual work. The McCoy’s latest work featured in the present exhibition, Show Me expands on their previous investigations and gives way to a presentation of the contemporary spectacle that results from the aesthetic re-instantiation of obsolete technology on the one hand and a translation of the conventions and stereotypes associated with the art world on the other. In Video Inversion (2009), the artists use a found equipment crate as a stage for a deconstructed VCR. This antiquated film device is set upright exposing its underside as the machine is set in a repetitious cycle to load a cassette that is not forthcoming. In Artists Talks (2008), the McCoy’s enlisted unknown actors with no art-making or art history background to present and discuss an artwork that was supposedly made by him or herself. The three-minute video performances range from comic to insightful, but almost never adhere to the standardized language of a “real” artist’s talk. This work presents another type of closed-circuit system, bounded by limitations of categorization and knowledge that makes viewers question the arbitrary standard to which they hold any given genre. The McCoys succeed in further circumnavigating our reliance on systems of understanding and underscoring the futility of this dependence. The McCoy’s work has been widely exhibited in the US and internationally, recent exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Film Institute in London, The Beall Center in Irvine, CA, pkm Gallery in Beijing, the San Jose Museum of Modern Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, and Artists Space in New York. Their art is held in numerous museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA-NY, The Milwaukee Art Museum, and MUDAM the Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg. Articles about their work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, The Wire, Art International, Wired Magazine, and The Independent.