Projected Video
8 feet wide
13 min loop
“A virtually static video of a nude male model becomes abstracted by the mere act of rotating the image 90 degrees. Humorously, his genitals form the central axis around which the image swings. I think of a map of the United States pinned to the wall. Each blink, sigh or stretch, becomes an event, as in “earthquake in Alaska,” or “tornado in Kansas.” Warhol, in his film Kiss, was perhaps the first to discover the power of an island of motion in a sea of stillness. Evie Leder refers to a number of contemporary and modern masters in this profound work.
Think of John Cage’s 4’33”, a composed work of four minutes and 33 seconds of musicians not playing; the listener hears ambient sound incorporated by Cage into his composition. Leder wants the same for her video viewer: the tics and presence of the body replace a literal bodily narrative with a found one.
The sexual politics of the work are unavoidable yet provocative: the artist is a queer woman intentionally objectifying a man’s body. More than a simple parody of issues of “the gaze,” the work is a demand for permission to look, and a cri de coeur, after a generation of feminism, against the male still being the default gender of our consciousness.”
— Renny Pritikin
Director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis