An exhibition curated by Jason Simon
November 6 – December 13, 2014 and January 28 – February 28, 2015
Opening – Thursday, November 6, from 5 PM to 8 PM
Jason Simon’s second exhibition at Artexte samples film and video distribution histories. Four new works suggest a private constellation of a shared, public, moving-image past. A facsimile of the Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Film rental and sales catalog, circa 1974, and a reconstituted set of Video Against AIDS, (a curated program on three-cassettes from 1989), together bracket a video art history. In a new collaborative architectural sculpture created with Josiah McElheny, portals divide the gallery with the suggestion of a darkened projection booth; and a single iconic photograph depicts McGraw-Hill’s instructions to teachers of La Jetée. At stake for Simon is nothing less than how an audience and a culture are created.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Callicoon Fine Arts, where the works were first shown in autumn 2013.
Jason Simon is a professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where he was founding faculty of the Department of Media Culture. Simon worked as an assistant curator of film and video at the Wexner Center for the Arts, where he established the museum’s Art & Tech lab, and was represented by the Pat Hearn Gallery from 1994-1999. His work has exhibited widely, including the Whitney Museum Biennial; Neue Gallerie, Graz; ICA London; the Tang Museum; The New Museum and The Kitchen. In 2013, ten years of the One Minute Film Festival he co-hosted with Moyra Davey became an exhibition at Mass MoCA. In New York, Simon co-founded the cooperative Orchard gallery, 2005-2008; he co-curated the traveling exhibitionMacho Man, Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, and is represented by the Callicoon Fine Arts gallery. His videos are distributed by The Video Data Bank and his writing has appeared inArtforum, Frieze, Purple, Parkett and Afterimage.
