Scott Kiernan & Victoria Keddie

Jan 18 - Feb 17, 2019

Safe Gallery, 1004 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
 

Scott Kiernan’s sound and video installations are restless within their own materiality. Often working in real-time with analog video, his work blends synthesized and found content through language games. He’s made video poems for an age of verbal erosion and painted large-scale, pre-internet clip art ads devoid of their products. Horse Tail Falls at Safe Gallery deconstructs a found photograph which shares the namesake of a Yosemite waterfall known to glow as if in flames under certain light. Through his work, found images and phrases find new life, free from their former meaning and reaching a shaky hand out to touch back through the machine.

Kiernan founded and co-directed Louis V.E.S.P, an artist-run gallery and performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and is the director of Various/Artists, a publishing imprint for handmade records and videotapes by artists working across diverse media. He’s exhibited and performed internationally at venues including the New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard Art Museums, P.S.122, Ballroom Marfa, and the Center for International Contemporary Art in Rome, among others.

Victoria Keddie combines a practice in sound, moving image, and performance to understand the after-life of the broadcasted signal and its ongoing decay. The language she embeds into her systems moves swiftly, evolving around their own inner logic. They fuse audio dissonance with whirlpools of color and electronic light. Her recent work, Object Afterlife, develops a language for outer space debris—chunks of rocket, flakes of paint— and their afterlife as they float on through Earth’s Lower Orbit. Previous works such as 54 days of blank sun in July (through the lens of Ben Riley’s snare) and then pits solar eclipse imagery against a rapid snare drum.

Amongst the work she’ll show at Safe Gallery, three-channel video Test Patterns is an in-studio journey through the cathode ray tube. In this work, Keddie acts as a medium between sound and image in their sensitive efforts to communicate with each other.