We are very pleased to welcome DC-based artist Ina Archer back to the gallery for a solo screening of a selection of her video works made between 1991 and the present. This program culled from Archer’s extensive body of work — ranging from single-channel to multi-channel installations involving physical and sculptural elements — are centered around the “representation of African Americans and of Others through re-making, re-editing and re-contextualizing images of blackness in commercial cinema.”
In her works, Archer often remaps the history of cinema through the evidential use of found footage at times combined with the artist’s own parodic performances, approaching recurring themes such as miscegenation, minstrelsy, appropriation, and the representation of the marginalized found in Hollywood films and musicals.
For example in the 23-minute video “1/16th of 100%!?” (1993-96), a title referencing the definition of a “colored person” according to a 1910 amendment to the constitution of the State of Virginia, Archer examines racism in the US through pre-1964 legal texts and scenes from Hollywood movies including “Blond Venus” (1932), “Show Boat” (1936), and "Imitation of Life” (1959), among others.
A short chapter from a work-in-progress “Il Giallo della Paine! (The Yellow of Paine)” — employing tropes from 1970s American horror, British Hammer fright movies, and Italian Giallo thrillers — juxtaposes sequences from John Huston’s “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967) with original footage shot by the artist in a personal investigation of what happened to her family’s house and possessions following the death of her father.
The earliest of the eleven works in the program is the 1991 film “7 & Deadly” featuring Taylor Mead and other New York actors each personifying a deadly sin. “Trail Her” (2014) includes the most current of her appropriated materials in which Archer updates and upends the trailer for the movie “Her”, notably featuring the main character played by Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his computer’s OS, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
Archer will be in attendance and available for Q&A following the screening.
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Ina Archer is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer and writer whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally including at Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas; Maysles Cinema, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Portland Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; Spelman Collage Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, among others.
Archer 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. She is a Media Conservator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. She is also a contributor to Film Comment Magazine, as well as other film periodicals and three blogs (Continuum Film Blog, Black Leader, Ina’s Horror Blog).
Ina Archer received a BA in Film/Video from RISD and an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU.
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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).