Jeremy Blake

Century 21 moves from the roof of the Winchester house to zoom in on a complex of three domed, space-age movie theaters situated across the street: Century 21, Century 22 and Century 23, alluding to the fact that it is film, TV and the media that perpetuate the icon of the gunfighter. The work consists of three short sections intended to represent what is “playing” in each of the theaters. These include richly layered montages of the Old West and pop-culture imagery, as well as art and film celebrities who appear as phantom stand-ins to embody the specters of the Cowboy and of Sarah Winchester herself.

Winchester Redux (2004) by the late, renowned digital artist Jeremy Blake (1971 – 2007) is an abridged version of the artist’s acclaimed Winchester Trilogy.

How much do staircases and doors leading nowhere in the Californian Winchester House reveal about the owner’s superstitions and how much about the years of converting and rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake? In the centrepiece of his trilogy, Jeremy Blake fills the labyrinthine interiors of this architectural rarity with unreal light and colour apparitions of impressive beauty and oppressive impact.

Combines static 16mm historical photographs of the famous Winchester house, drawings, and laborious digital manipulation to convey a psychological portrait of the famous San Jose landmark. Accompanied by a moody soundtrack, the piece opens with a black-and-white shot of the architectural facade. Superimposed over the house, the silhouette of a gunfighter fills the frame, alluding to the Winchester legacy. As the film unfolds, both mansion and rifleman are eclipsed by veils of saturated color and kinetic abstractions. Painterly shapes resembling gunshot wounds morph into Rorschach–like inkblots and back again into rifle–bearing specters.

Blake’s Chemical Sundown aims at LA’s fantasy of exceptionally colorful sunsets that are in reality ominously artificial and caused by pollution

installation/video art

installation/video art