Stardance

Stardance

Jan 23–Feb 16, 2014

January 23 – February 16, 2014
Gallery 4

Featuring Thomas Isaac

Contemporary at Blue Star announces an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Thomas Isaac, Stardance from January 23 through February 16, 2014. An Opening Reception will take place Thursday, January 23 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, and is open and free to the public.

BIOGRAPHY:

Thomas Isaac is a video artist and painter living and working in Los Angeles, CA. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably in 2009 with the National Museum of the American Indian at the Native Cinema Showcase in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Recent exhibitions include photographs of the Navajo Nation and an installation video work at the Hudson Linc Gallery in Los Angeles, in a group show titled “From the Desert”. Explore more of Isaac’s work on his youtube channel.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Stardance is a video work serving as a meditation on our relationship to time and how we experience the present. Within the piece time is suspended and slowed down to the point where our current relationship with the present, 1 second to 1 second, is no more. An artificial “dreamtime” is created. Both the video and the soundtrack are slowed down. The 3 minute commissioned sound piece by P. Adrian Frasier has been expanded, running the entire duration of the video.

To explore how we perceive and experience the present, Star Wars and Dances with Wolves were mixed together by hand using an analog video mixer. The recorded mixing of the two films, one movie depicting the future, set in imagined intergalactic space and the other depicting the past and set in the American West, show how the present can create new moving images, whereby the mixing creates, destroys, covers and distorts the traditional, linear nature of time. The resulting churning of images erases all contexts of the two original storylines, and creates a piece where chaos is effortlessly taken with great comfort.