Complicit! Contemporary American Art and Mass Culture

Sept. 1, 2006 - Oct. 29, 2006

University of Virginia Art Museum

“Complicit! Contemporary American Art and Mass Culture,” features more than 60 works by more than 50 cutting-edge contemporary, well known and emerging artists working in any and every medium — paint, sculpture, photography, mixed- and multi-media, book arts, printing and digital output. They are all engaged in a clear dialogue with mass culture, media industries and the history of fine art’s own vocabulary of methods and subjects of expression.


Works Shown

The Kiss

2002, installation with custom software

In this installation, a red suitcase contains hardware and software that algorithmically reenact a scene from Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 film Body Heat. The McCoys film actors playing the parts of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in a pivotal erotic moment of the film. The scene is then broken into short clips and digitized so that the actors images become manipulable as individual frames. Custom computer software selects these clips according to ever-changing patterns, creating a continuous live remix, projected at cinematic scale.