Works by Ina Archer, Ben Coonley, Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin, E.S.P. TV, James Fotopoulos, Maggie Hazen, Xandra Ibarra, Kristin Lucas, Erica Magrey, Eileen Maxson, Alex McQuilkin, Shana Moulton, Isabel Sakura, Marco Scozzaro, Nastya Valentine

Still from “Spictacle III: Virgensota Jota” (2015) by Sandra Ibarra - Image courtesy of the artist
Microscope is pleased to present Green Screens (Part 1), a screening series of moving image works made using green screen or other chroma key compositing.
The focus of the series is on the artistic use of chroma keying in both analog and digital formats. The technique — perhaps most often seen in weather reports — essentially involves the use of green, or another solid color, in a recorded scene which is later replaced with separate film and video footage or other imagery.
Part 1 launches Green Screens with a selection of short video works, made over the past 15 years, by a contemporary artists representing several generations who employ the green screen — or blue, black, orange, or other chromatic tones — in various personal, provocative, and frequently humorous ways.
Green Screens (Part 1) also considers the green screen more broadly as a magical surface that vanishes in order for new images to appear, a portal freeing artists from spacial and temporal constraints, even from visibility, as well as a resourceful technology for visual experimentation, often tied to performance. For the works in the program the artists create alternative narratives, propose unlikely parallel universes, elude objectification, and parody cultural tropes, among other approaches.
The green screen is the more recent translation of its predecessors the black screen, used in early cinema, and the blue screen, first used in the 1930s with celluloid film as well, with both requiring multiple exposure procedures.
Several artists will be in attendance.
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Ina Archer is interdisciplinary artist whose multimedia and single channel works have been shown nationally including Cinema Project’s Expanded Frames: a celebration and examination of critical cinema in Portland, Or. “Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, GA., and The Contemporary Art Museum, Houston and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Additionally, she has programmed film and video shows at MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center and Light Industry. Ina was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow, a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and she has been awarded numerous residencies. In 2017, Ina joined The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture as a Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant. Finally, Ina is a regular contributor to Film Comment Magazine, and to their podcast and she has written for other film periodicals. She sometimes maintains her many blogs.
Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin began their collaborations at Alfred University, where they both received BFA degrees. Burns received his MFA in video and performance art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Martin received an MFA in media and sculpture from The University of California, San Diego. Together, they have based their single channel videotapes and curations on research into diverse speculative fictions including re-imagined educational practices, cryptozoological musicals, appropriated horror genres, paranormal phenomenon, re-animation choreographies, cos-play, and eco-dystopian aversion studies. Their works have been screened and exhibited internationally in venues including Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Paris/Berlin International, and Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn. They have jointly participated in residencies including Eyebeam, Experimental Television Center, and Signal Culture.
Ben Coonley is an artist working with video, computers, 3D, and cats. Since his previous exhibition at the gallery in 2016, his work has appeared in “3D: Double Vision” at LACMA in Los Angeles (currently on view) and in “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Coonley’s video works have also been screened in venues including BAM’s 2015 “3D in the 21st Century” series, MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York: Cinema”, Performa, the New Museum, the Moscow Biennale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Coonley’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. In 2010, he was named one of Film Comment’s “21 Leading Lights of Projection Performance”. Coonley studied Art Semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University, and received an MFA from Bard College in 2003. He was born in Boston, MA and currently lives and works between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, New York.
To date, E.S.P. TV has held over 100 live television taping events internationally. In Fall 2014, E.S.P. TV built a mobile electronic studio out of a defunct television news van and in April 2015, toured it across the United States in partnership with local artists and arts organizations. Now named UNIT 11, the van hosts a seasonal residency program for the study of broadcast, transmission, and electronic arts. E.S.P. TV has worked with various venues and institutions including: The Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art, Printed Matter, Millennium Film Workshop, New School, Recess, Camera Club, Hunter College Art Galleries (NY, NY); Interstate Projects, Spectacle Theater, Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, Knockdown Center, Flux Factory, Roulette (Brooklyn, NY); Queens Museum (Queens, NY); Harvard Art Museums, Franklin Street Works (Stamford, CT), Liminal Space (Oakland, CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), Ballroom Marfa, Marfa Public Radio, (Marfa, TX), Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX), S1 (Portland, OR), Nightingale Cinema (Chicago, IL), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, General Public (Berlin), STORE (Dresden), Studio XX (Montreal), SAW Media Centre (Ottawa), Kling and Bang Gallery (Reykjavik) and Pallas Projects (Dublin).
James Fotopoulos is an artist working primarily with the mediums of moving image, sculpture, and drawing. Among his many notable film and video works, which range from several seconds to over seven hours are Zero (1997), his first feature which debuted when Fotopoulos was just 20, Migrating Forms (1999), Christabel (2001), Jerusalem (2003-2004), The Sky Song (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dignity (2012), and There (2014). His works have screened and exhibited in the US and abroad including at MoMA P.S.1, Walker Art Center, Whitney Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Andy Warhol Museum, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Festival del Film Locarno, Museo de Art Contemportaneo del Zulia, Venezuela, Biennial for Videoart, Mechelen, Belgium, among others. His work has been discussed in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, The New York Post, and others. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant. James Fotopoulos was born in Chicago, IL in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York.
Maggie Hazen is a New York based interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, whose work explores themes of resistance in a cinematically real world of violence through a combination of moving image, sculpture and performance. She has exhibited, screened and performed works at Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play; The Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, CA; The Granoff Center, Brown University; CICA Museum, South Korea; Concorse Gallery, Washington DC; and The Boston Young Contemporaries, Boston, MA, among others. She has had residencies and fellowships at The Bronx Museum; The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art; The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, European Graduate School, Switzerland; I:O at the Helikon Art Center in Turkey; Vermont Studio Center; and The Pasadena Side Street Projects, CA. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and has taught at New York University, The Stevens Institute of Technology, The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art and is currently a professor at Bard College in Studio Arts.
Xandra Ibarra is a performance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez now based in Oakland, California. Her work uses performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racial, gender and queer subject. Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá), The Broad Museum (LA), The Anderson Collection (Stanford), CITRU-Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (D.F.), Joe’s Pub (NYC) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF) to name a few. She is the recipient of the Queer|Art Award for Recent Work in 2018, the Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, ReGen Artist Fund, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. In 2018, Ibarra co-curated a yearlong feminist performance art series entitled EN CUATRO PATAS with Nao Bustamante at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Ibarra’s work has also been featured in several recent and forthcoming books. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings features her performance “I am your Puppet” (2007) while Amber Jamilla Musser’s Brown Jouissance: Feminine Imaginings includes a chapter about Ibarra’s collaboration with performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, “Untitled Fucking” (2013). Leticia Alvarado’s Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production features Ibarra’s performance “Skins” (2015) on the cover and within the book.
Kristin Lucas lives in Oakland and New York, and recently Weimar, Germany where she was a participant of the 13th International Studio Program of ACC the City of Weimar. Lucas is an artist working in the realms of digital art, video, performance, intervention, sculpture, and installation. She investigates visions of future, the effects of an accumulation of rapid spread, flash-in-the-pan technology, and the impact of the digital medium on perceptions of time and space. Lucas' work has been exhibited in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, New York, and in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Artists Space, New York; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; ZKM; Karlsruhe, and at festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Mexico City, Montreal, Toronto, New York and San Francisco. She has had solo exhibitions at Postmasters Gallery, New York; Or Gallery, Vancouver; JEMA, a location variable museum; Windows, Brussels; O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Linz; Foundation for Art and Creative Technologies, Liverpool; [Plug in], Basel; and Insitute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Colbert Foundation Award for Media Arts; Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant for Video and Performance; Urban Visionaries Award for Emerging Talent. Her single channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Erica Magrey is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working with video, performance, music, costume, sculpture, photography, and set design. She was a 2014-2015 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident, and was the 2011 NY Artist in Residence with iaab/International Exchange and Studio Program Basel, Switzerland, as well as a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work. Career highlights include screenings, performances and exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Sculpture Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Kaskadenkondensator (Basel), The Kitchen, Klaus von Nichtssagend, 106 Green, Magic Pictures (Philadelphia, PA), Freight + Volume, and Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Eileen Maxson is an artist working at the confluence of video, performance and installation. Her works have been exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; FotoFest, Houston, TX; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany; Art in General, New York, NY; Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY; Museum of Moving Image, Queens, NY; and Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY among others. Maxson has been awarded residencies at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Brooklyn, NY (2013-2014), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), New York (2013), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2012-2013), and De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2008-2010). Grants include Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Artadia: The Fund for Art & Dialogue, New York; The Dallas Museum of Art; and Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Maxson was the first recipient of the Arthouse Texas Prize. She currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas.
Alex McQuilkin’s videos, installations, and works on paper engage with a distinctly American notion of what it means to be a young woman in Western culture. Her videos combine self-destructive performances with teenage sweetness, treating the endemic narcissism of the Facebook generation with dark humor. Likewise, her meticulously rendered drawings of women’s hair—isolated from the the bodies and faces of their owners—tangle with mass-media images of female beauty and the precarious projection of the self onto idealized and unrealistic models. McQuilkin received her MFA from New York University in 2008. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Tufts University in Medford, and she has shown at institutions including the Knoxville Museum, the Olbright Foundation in Berlin, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
With a savvy fusion of humor and poignancy, Professor Moulton’s multidisciplinary work in video and performance explores contemporary anxieties though her filmic alter ego, Cynthia. Moulton’s cosmology of symbols, everyday objects, and altered states coalesce to form an alchemical snapshot of ambivalent self-awareness in trying times. Moulton, widely considered to be a leader in the field, has been broadly exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Palais De Tokyo, Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, Art in General, New York, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, La Loge, Brussels, and The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Group exhibitions include Migros Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Lisbon, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Göteborgs Konsthall, Göteborg, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. She has performed at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Kitchen, New York, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, The Getty, Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, South London Gallery, London and Cricoteka, Kraków among many others. Moulton's work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, ArtReview, Art in America, Flash Art, Artpress, Metropolis M, BOMB Magazine, and Frieze among others. Her work is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix and she is a featured artist on Art21’s New York Close Up.
Isabel Sakura (a.k.a Sakura Daijin) is a Japanese-American multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, working mainly with music videos and installation as forms to explore themes of the femme idol and toxic romance in relation to the digital body and identity. Her work has previously appeared in exhibits, screenings and performances in New York at Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Bronx Art Space, Knockdown Center, and Trans Pecos, among others. She graduated with a BFA and a minor in Culture and Media from Parsons in 2018.
Marco Scozzaro (1979) is an Italian artist based New York. His practice started with music and sound before focusing on visual arts and photography. He received his MA in Psychology from the University of Parma, Italy and has been a Photo Global artist-in-residence at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His work has been exhibited in group and solo shows including Ed Varie and New York Photo Festival, NY; Galleria Civica di Modena, IT; Galerie Villa Des Tourelles, Paris, FR; Grid Photography Biennial, Amsterdam, NL; Mala Stanica National Gallery, Skopje, MK; London Design Festival, UK, among others. His photographs have appeared on international publications including The New York Times, Wallpaper, GQ, ArtReview, Osmos and Vice, among others. He is a freelance photographer and teaches photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Nastya Valentine is an American artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles, CA. She studied at Bard College, graduating with a BFA in 2014. Valentine has shown work at exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, San Jose, Berlin, and Moscow. She has also curated high-concept art shows in Los Angeles with various themes and collaborators. Her film Darkness received the Best Experimental Narrative award from Planet 9 Film Festival in 2018.
Microscope Gallery Event Series 2019 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).