Artist Talk: Friday, March 4 at 5:30 pm

Moveable Image: Video Art by Collis/Donadio, Shala Miller and Rachel Schmidt explores the spatial possibilities of video art and highlights contemporary works that transcend the conventional rectangular screen. Shala Miller, Rachel Schmidt and artist duo Collis/Donadio (Shannon Collis and Liz Donadio) deliver moving image works in their respective visual languages that shift the viewer’s experience from viewing a flat surface to becoming immersed in an installation. Whether it is Collis/Donadio’s layered projections that create trompe l’oeil dimensionality, Rachel Schmidt’s unconventionally-shaped wall frames constructed from plastic trash with which she frames her videos, or Shala Miller’s use of an antique glass door as a projection screen that references domesticity and gender roles, the video installations in the exhibition find nuanced ways to make the image moveable, dynamic and haunting, and place the viewer in the dead center of the work rather than a safe distance from it.

The habitual experience of viewing moving image works is often stationary. The works in Moveable Image, however, invite the viewer to move around the installation and engage with the videos from different points and angles. Doing so, the viewer is asked to notice new dimensions, such as presence and temporality. While the conventional moving image transports the viewer to the there and then, works in Moveable Image allow the viewer to consider the here and now, leaving open the fourth wall for ruminations on wide-ranging contemporary issues the artists explore, such as selfhood, identity, and climate change.