Peter Sarkisian    Dec 21 - Mar 12, 2008

James Kelly Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition of Peter Sarkisian's new work.

For fifteen years, Sarkisian has explored the parameters of video installation, always relating the mediated experience of video to our actual tactile experience of the world, working in an area between cinema and sculpture. However, this new body of work constitutes a break-through, in that he has invented a new hybrid of video-object using three-dimensional vacuum formed thermal plastic screens. This technology gives the illusion of video in three dimensions, thus enabling the artist to render his metaphors and narratives ever more palpable.

For this exhibition, Sarkisian will present four works utilizing his new technology. In Extruded Video Engine #1 the artist imagines what video itself looks like. It turns out to have a very cartoon-like, decidedly analog appearance with gears turning, pistons pumping, wheels whirring, very much a Rube Goldberg machine. Sarkisian's piece is also part of an avant-garde art tradition concerned with the machine. It's lineage includes works such as Duchamp's, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and Leger's Ballet Mécanique from 1924, in which pots and pans are used to great effect, creating a fantasia/nightmare of the machine age.

In two of the works, Sarkisian returns to his narrative interest and focuses on depiction of a human being in interaction with objects. Objects predominate, taking on power from their larger scale and their projected forms in the vacuum molds. Camera position is chosen to create and exploit an ambiguity in the scene. As always, Sarkisian's work exploits the seductive capabilities of technology to engage the viewer in questions of a philosophical and psychological nature.

Peter Sarkisian's work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major public collections such as the San Francisco museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.