VIDEO
INSTALLATION DOCUMENTATION
USC Fisher Museum "Re:mind" exhibition archive footage
September - November, 2014
Film by Eric Minh Swenson
Music by Ari Chais
On September 17th, the USC Fisher Museum of Art presented, Miri Chais:Re:mind an imagined world changing rapidly with the technological advances. How pervasive it may become, enhancing our futuristic lives and behaviors as a society towards one another and our view of mortality.
"If we are programmed like computers, then what differentiates man from machine? If artificial memories and complex skills can be embedded artificially, instead of learned, what will become of the human soul and how we experience the world?"
Miri Chais' Re:mind plants the viewer at the intersection of this physical and digital world.
Shulamit Gallery "We are the Hollow Men" exhibition archive footage
January - March, 2014
"The Hollow Men" show was inspired by the T.S. Elliot Poem "Hollow Man"
Excerpt:
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
VIDEO WORKS
Every image in Chais's videos are manipulated with multiple filters and brush strokes. Using a vast image-base culled from the Internet; Hollywood icons, MRI scans, landscapes transform into an ecstatic environment.
With the painterly quality of Abstract Expressionism and the cool neutrality of post-internet culture, these works create a new dimension of cultural exploration.