Microscope welcomes New York-based artist and filmmaker Jacky Connolly to the gallery for "Life Simulations", a screening of new and recent videos including her latest six-part machinima work Anhedonia, in which members of a group home in the Southern US experience hallucinatory breaks from their "realities".
Connolly’s video works, designed within the life simulation computer game “The Sims”, convey the alienation of suburban living as well as that found in the designed, programmed existence of a 3D animated environment. Her avatars and other characters, who live in an Antonioni-like absence of dialogue and are only heard through their sporadical music practice sessions, seem to suffer from a melancholy caused by their confinement to the virtual, while representing existences and circumstances deeply rooted in reality.
The screening also includes Connolly’s 2016 partly autobiographical Hudson Valley Ruins, a 30-minute “hyperlink cinema” work set in the valley region where the artist was born, as well as an earlier two-channel video Fawn’s Leap, NY, a famous cliff and waterfall in the area and one of the most depicted scenes in works by Hudson Valley artists.
Connolly will be in attendance and for a Q&A after the screening.
general admission $8
students w/ ID $6
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Jacky Connolly (b. 1990, Lower Hudson Valley, NY) lives and works in New York. Connolly’s film works are indebted to cinematic and literary genre influences, as well as an innovative use of machinima technique for imaginative world-making and storytelling. In 2016, she completed ‘Hudson Valley Ruins’, a 30-minute film created in a life simulation computer game, which was acquired by and screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016.’ Her most recent film, Anhedonia (2017) is an 18-minute machinima film in six chapters, commissioned by Daata Editions. Recent solo exhibition include ‘Shadows on the Hudson,’ Kimberly-Klark, Queens, NY (2016) and ‘Hudson Valley Ruins’, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA (2016). Recent screening programs in 2017 include Post-Apocalyptic Realism at Museum Brandhorst in Munich, DE, and the film program of Art Cologne in Cologne, DE.
Full program notes and additional info: www.microscopegallery.com