STOP MOTION

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, two renowned artists from New York working together since 1996, intersect cinema and the computer in their works. They combine the possibilities of computer-based archiving, data-base-systems, and digital storage with the principles of filmic narration. Their work is situated between popular culture, new technical media formats, and the analysis of the language of cinema. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy create new sculptural possibilities for presenting video, from database models of storage to live recording. Their work includes single-channel-video, performance art, internet-based works, interactive computer installations and miniature landscapes with complex video arrangements, which are controlled by specially developed software.
 

Their works deal with the clash between the narrative structures of film and television and their computer-based revision. Using digital technology they analyse the conditions of production as well as audience behaviour. They deconstruct the production of Hollywood movies, restage and recontextualize them, taking up the viewers' media-literacy in referring to images known to a wide public from cinema and TV. Their video works and installations combine mass media clichés with personal experiences and memories.

The presentation at the Edith-Russ-Haus is the McCoys' first solo show in a German-speaking country.

Five pieces are presented in the exhibition, which provides an overview of the artists' work. The Edith-Russ-Haus shows early pieces, which deal with the presentation of filmic material in specially programmed databases. Every Shot, Every Episode (2000) is based on the action-TV-series Starsky and Hutch from the 1970ies in which two American policemen chase criminals. In I number the Stars (2004) the popular science-fiction-series Star Trek from the 1960ies is broken down into different categories and searched according to diverse criteria. The viewer is given the possibility to watch the series with the help the artists' search words: A database allows to retrieve events, objects, and emotions and the plot is broken down into constitutive elements.

In other works the two artists restage famous Hollywood movies. Kiss (2002) recreates a key scene from the movie Body Heat (1981) by Lawrence Kasdan. In the erotic thriller and modern film noir William Hurt kicks down a glass door in order to kiss Kathleen Turner in a passionate embrace. The McCoys hired two actors to re-enact the two parts. The ten minutes filmed during this re-enactment are recombined over and over again by a computer – into an everlasting kiss. Other pieces indirectly refer to the production of Hollywood movies and the influence of their images on our perception. In imaginative projections and sculptural arrangements the artists unfold their own dreams and desires before the audience as a film set in Hollywood-fashion. Eternal Return (2003) and Double Fantasy IV (Religion) (2006), a work created for the exhibition in Oldenburg, consist of tableaux, which are reminiscent of toy-models, miniature-train-landscapes, and doll houses. Eternal Return is based on the movie The Gay Divorcee (1934) with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and addresses the topics of fantasy and memory. Dancing figures, captured from diverse angles, are projected onto a wall, where they call to mind the great era of Hollywood dance-films and their glamour. The intricate interplay of colour- and black-and-white-elements serves to highlight the relations between the imaginary and the real. In Double Fantasy IV (Religion) religion is the central theme.