State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now

Crystal Bridges Museum featuring 2-channel video installation

Sinew-en-ciel
15' x 9'
HD Video, acrylic, rhinesones, sound

 Stillives II: Stilllivin' Vignette 
7' x 4'
HD Video on vinyl

All day, every day, we are overwhelmed with images: scrolling feeds, digital touchscreens, glowing pixels. Multiple simultaneous voices continuously tweet and share and like, interrupting one another to find their way into our consciousness. Using a similarly tumultuous structure, Dave Greber’s video work co-opts the vocabulary of our commercialized digital world, using repetition, color, and discontinuity to disrupt our experience of time and space.
 
In the projected video Stilllives II: Vignette, we see a continuous loop of changing surfaces shown from above. A pair of hands unfurls a patterned blanket, then a mug drops and shatters, splashing its Technicolor contents across the screen. A bolt of fabric covers over the mess and the cycle starts afresh. The artist calls these works “moving paintings,” and we can see why. Yet the repetitive structure and obsession with surface point to the language of advertisements and social media. What might these works have to say about the way we interact with our world today?

-From the State of the Art Catalog