OPENING RECEPTION:
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 2009 7-10PM
170 NW 23RD STREET
MIAMI, FL 33127
305.438.9908
INFO@WORLDCLASSBOXING.ORG
World Class Boxing is pleased to announce the opening of Paul Pfeiffer: a video installation opening Saturday September 12, 2009. Born in Honolulu in 1966, he moved to San Francisco to study art when he was twenty-years old. By the early 1990s, he settled in New York and began to develop the sculptural/video works for which he is most known for.
Through multimedia installations Pfeiffer contemplates an uneasy dialectic of presence and absence thought, acts of erasure, camouflage, displacement, and reconstruction. He often reconfigures iconic moments from the mass media to produce situations of physical and psychological estrangement. His computerized video manipulations set figures into spasms, morph others seamlessly into one another, turn others into aqueous wraiths, or obliterate them completely. His frequent use of clips from National Basketball Association games is less concerned with the cultural consequences of transmitting sporting events on television than with the available and extreme forms of physicality in a dramatic architectural arena.
The Long Count video series calls attention to the space surrounding it. The video footage is from famous fights of Muhammad Ali in which Pfeiffer has digitally camouflaged Ali’s body, those of his opponent (Ali Frazier), and those of the referees with portions of the crowd and the ring itself. The figures become phantasmal presences whose movements can be detected if not completely comprehended.
Goethe’s Message to the New Negroes #1 and #2 feature the heads of professional basketball players’ that are turned into otherworldly phenomena. Pfeiffer’s digital imaging process either holds moving entities in stasis or sets static beings in motion. One of the players takes a basketball making its way around a court and appears to freeze the ball in a state of hovering rotation, remaining constant at the center of the composition while the background shifts dizzyingly. The blending of the player’s head into one another creates an imaginary sense of circular motion. Within an image that essentially remains fixed, while the second approaches the player’s heads from the back to suggest a similar tension between a consistent subject in both the foreground and the shifting background.
Pfeiffer challenges the viewer to sort out the dichotomy between a fixed element in a visual space and the fluidity of the space surrounding this element. Pfeiffer’s approach to the body in space as well as the interplay of absence and presence is reinforced in his work.
World Class Boxing, a former, boxing gym, is an exhibition space displaying the contemporary art collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl. Prior exhibitions include shows by Olafur Eliasson, Simon Starling, Julie Mehretu, Paul Chan, Mark Bradford and Tamy Ben Tor.