Position Spaces __ Gibson + Recoder

What recent exhibition did you see that made a strong impression on you and why?

During our recent visit to Washington D.C. to present The Changeover System (2023) in collaboration with sound artist Richard Garet at the National Gallery of Art, we had a chance to see Sir Isaac Julien’s sublime video installation on Frederick Douglass at the National Portrait Gallery. Sitting through Lessons of the Hour (2019), it dawned on us that we were in the presence of a great cinematic auteur in the tradition of Sergei Eisenstein – especially the Eisenstein of October (1928), where the theory of intellectual montage is most forcefully articulated. In Lessons of the Hour it is not so much the relations from shot-to-shot as from screen-to-screen across this five-channel historical panorama where the lessons of intellectual montage exquisitely reverberate.

The exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of the work by the National Portrait Gallery and was originally commissioned by the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester as part of a series of solo exhibitions on new media curated by distinguished scholar John G. Hanhardt. One of the exhibitions in this series featured two of our sculptural installation works, Light Spill (2005) and Threadbare (2013), which were acquired by Memorial Art Gallery.

What are you working on right now and where will you present your work next?

We are currently working on a solo exhibition that will open this Spring at FiveMyles in Brooklyn. The work is centered around the paradoxical and somewhat absurd, if not disturbing, notion that there was once a moving image medium in which images were recorded and preserved for playback on an extremely flimsy ribbon of mylar coated with a fine grain of iron oxide – otherwise known as rust. The VHS (Video Home System) tape was in essence already obsolete by the time it hit the market. “Planned obsolescence” was its modus operandi, though not exactly in some foreseeable afterlife of the medium but precisely at the very moment of its consumption, typically in the living room.

We imagine ourselves at the receiving end of this circuit long after the materials have expired via their arbitrary decommission and replaced by newer ones, and discovering ways to reinvent the wheel so to speak. Those familiar with our object-based expanded cinema practice will hopefully see the newer work in fruitful dialogue with the earlier work. There is also something a bit comical about our “transition” from analog film to analog video in the digital age.

What are the biggest challenges in sustaining your practice where you are based?

Based in New York City for well over two decades now, the biggest challenge for us is surviving as artists without gallery representation. In the meantime, we have been lucky to be included in major exhibitions over the years and have our work represented in museum collections around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and Museum Kunstpalace Düsseldorf.