Video Installation: Video Artists

Video Installation is a contemporary art form that is a combination of video technology with installation art, making use of the entire surrounding environment to affect the audience. Its origins begin in the 1970’s at the beginning of video art; this had increased the popularity as digital video production technology has become readily accessible. In modern day, video installation is universal and visible in a range of environments including galleries and museums to an expanded field that includes site-specific work in urban or industrial landscapes. The most popular formats include monitor work, projection and performance, the only requirements need are electricity and darkness.

One of the main strategies used by the artists who produce video-installation is the incorporation of the space as a key element in the structure of the narrative. In this way, the well-known linear cinematic narrative is used throughout the space creating an immersive ambient. The viewer plays an active role as they create the narrative sequence by evolving in the space in this situation. There is also two other ways the audience is involved these are that sometimes the idea of a participatory audience is stretched further in an interactive video installation, on the other hand the video Is displayed in such a way that the viewer becomes part of the plot as they play a character in a film. In this day there are many video installation artists, all having their own unique take on this creative contempary art form.  In this essay I will focus on two main video installation artists, these include Amy Jenkins and Pipilotti Rist

Amy Jenkins

Amy Jenkins is an American artist who is known for her work in video installations and experimental film. Jenkins is best known for her multidisciplinary installations that combine video, audio, sculpture, and performance, which creates immersive environments. The recurrent themes of her intimate, visceral and personal narratives are famial relationships, home, sexuality and the male/female identity. Jenkins was one of the intial video projection artists in the early 1990’s to use video sculpture to create intimate artworks that contradict their technology. In her investigations of the female identity , mintuare objects have played a large role in Amy’s videos and multi media installations.

In her 1996 video installation "Ebb" Jenkins projected an image of a female bathing in red water which is seen as blood onto a tiny claw-foot tub on top of a ceramic-tiled pedestal.As the video progresses, the water in the tub gradually becomes creating the realistic illusion that the blood is unnaturally going back into her body, this is showing the reversal of the menstrual cycle. Other Short movies by Jenkins such as 2010's "Audrey Superhero" and  2013's "Becoming" feature the artists children, and feature themes such as personal narrative, gender identity and the relationship between a parent and its child.

Jenkins has exhibited internationally, including Stop Look Listen at The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Mixed Emotions at Hafia Museum Of Art, Threshold at The  
Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and Video Art/ Video Culture at The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.  Her art is also featured in public collections across North Carolina, Ohio and New York City.

Jenkin' s work has been funded by grants including New Hampshire State Council for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation fothe Arts and RExperimental Television Centre. Jenkins residencies include Harvestworks Media Artist-In-Residence in New York City, an NEA-sponsored Fellowship & Residency at The Virginia Centre for The Creative Arts as well as residencies at MacDowell Colony in New Hamptonshire, as well as across New York City and California. Amy was also nominated twice for the CalArts Alpert Award in Film/Video.



Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss visual artist who works with film, video and moving images which are most often displayed as projections. During her studies at University of Applied Arts Vienna, Rist began making super 8 films. The artists work generally last only a few minutes, and contained alterations in their colours, speed and sound. Her work usually treats issues related to gender, sexuality and the human body. Her colourful and musical works transmit happiness and simplicity, and her work is seen as feminist  by the world's art critics.

In Rist's 1986's "I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much" the artist dances before a camera in a black dress with uncovered breasts. The images are most often monochromatic and fuzzy. She repeatedly sings "im not the girl who misses much" a reference to the first line of the song "Happiness is a Warm Gun" sung by The Beatles. As the video concludes the images increasingly becomes blue and fuzzy and the sound stops.

In the 1992 "Pickelporno" the artist achieved notoriety, by producing a work about the female body and sexual excitation as the fisheye camera moves over the bodies of a couple, the images are charged by intense colours as well as being strange, sensual and ambiguous. The 1997 "Ever is Over All" shows a young woman walking in slow motion along a city street, smashing the windows of parked cars with a large hammer in the shape of a tropical flower. The audio video installation has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Rist' s nine video segments titled "Open My Glade" were played once every hour on a screen at Times Square in New York City, a project of the "Messages to the Public" program, which was founded in 1980. "Pour Your Body Out" was a commissioned multimedia installation organized by Klaus Biesebach and installed in the atrium of the Musuem of Modern Art in an early 2009. Rist quotes about the choice of using the atrium for the installation, saying "because it reminds me of a church's interior where you're constantly reminded that the spirit is good and the body is bad. This spirit goes up in space but the body remains on the ground. This piece is really about bringing those two differences together".

Other video installations by Rist include Rote Bar, Closet Circuit, Related Circut and many more in which she has been massively reconditioned for winning awards such as Best Exhibition Of Digital, Video, or Film, Art Prize of the City of Zurich and Kwangju Biennale Award.