Cirrus is pleased to announce the opening of Ghosting the Screen – a group show of works by New York based artists, Allan McCollum and Robert Thill. As the title suggests, the exhibition considers the television screen as an endless source of information, and an apparatus with which one can create and distort a sense of self and place.
For Lands of Shadow and Substance, Allan McCollum viewed the original Twilight Zone episodes from 1959 to 1964 and captured screenshots of scenes that included landscape paintings. Images of those paintings were then digitally edited, printed, and custom framed to create the series. Each of the 27 works in the series was printed proportionally to its original televised incarnation, creating an intimate conversation with the eerie landscapes.
While McCollum’s Lands of Shadow and Substance was sourced from a popular t.v. series, Robert Thill’s Untitled videograms employed light emitted by various television programs as a source of their creation. At exactly 8pm on Monday, September 8, 1991, Thill exposed light-sensitive paper to television screens, tuned into seven different channels. The result is a phantasmic and indiscernible translation of the information provided by the screens and their respective networks.
Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944, and now lives and works in New York. He has spent over forty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production. McCollum has had over 100 solo exhibitions. He has produced public art projects in the United States and Europe, and his works are held in over seventy art museum collections worldwide.
Robert Thill is an artist and author living in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been exhibited at apexart, Cirrus Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, Momenta Art, Nýlistasafnid / The Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, Iceland, and Pamela Auchincloss Project Space, New York, NY. Thill’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Art Criticism, Flash Art, Leonardo, and sehepunkte.