|
Introductory
text from the ‘Shared Moments’ catalogue, written by Murray Horne, CURATOR, WOOD STREET GALLERIES, PITTSEUROH, USA
Intimate video
The work of the Dutch artist Peter Bogers entails looking at oneself, heightening our awareness of
the physical and psychic parameters of our bodies, their place in
time and space and all its mediated realities. Throughout, the body
is detached, disassembled, deconstructed, recombined or becomes a
strange receptacle for re-routed fluids, all making us question its
reality. Bogers crosses one self with another, dissolving or confusing
perceptual boundaries between viewer and subject, artist and audience,
dream and death. Bogers invokes and engages Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” in which the viewer becomes “captured”
by the camera. His Shared Moments creates an intense intimacy between the viewer and the viewed as an array
of separate beings in their own time frames become choreographed and
crystallized into such a moment that grows more complex as it encompasses
us. Bogers alludes to what comes before and after that moment of still
photography, through the time-based medium of video. His video installations
stray far from the use of the medium in popular culture (especially
in advertising) with its rapid fire imagery assaulting us both subliminally
and overtly. Bogers repeats and slows down the action of his subjects,
in contradiction to the rapidity of the film medium and its 24 frames
to the second, juxtaposing, sharing and freezing moments of time that
both extend and erase it. In this sense, he plays with the motivations
of photography and film, in which, as essayist Iris Dressier writes,
“the desire to hold on coincides with the desire to kill the moment.”
This exhibition would not have been possible without the continual support of the board of
The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and its president, J. Kevin McMahon,
The Howard Heinz Endowment and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
A special thank you is extended to the Mondriaan Foundation for its
generous support of the exhibition.
The installation staff of Wood Street
Galleries (Erin O’Neill, George Dunn and Thaddeus Kellstadt) has been
outstanding, rising once again to the occasion by meeting the added
challenge of media-based work. Many thanks to Iris Dressier for her
insightful essay, to Brett Yasko of Wall-to-Wall Studios, whose catalogue
design extends the spirit of the exhibition and to curatorial assistant
Kristen Fair’s attention to detail. Finally, we wish to thank Peter
Bogers; his work is the reason for all our efforts and he made our
involvement an honor and pleasure.
MURRAY
HORNE CURATOR,
WOOD STREET GALLERIES THE
PITTSEUROH CULTURAL TRUST |