Is It Art? New Breed Goes Digital

Author: Chris Grosso

My co-editor Abbie Beane and I love the global artistic community. Our mission has been to infuse your imaginations with some artistic vision. Her original column - Is It Art? - has become a staple of The Middlebury Campus. Each week she presents an alternative and minority art form in hopes of inspiring you, our reader, to create. To fill-in for her this week and satiate your creative juices, I have decided to showcase a new artist and do some P.R. for him in the college arena. He is a member of the new, contemporary breed of artists that are rapidly becoming an elite group and are now doing some kick-ass work worldwide.

Our first studio visit is with the 32-year-old Jeremy Blake, who works primarily with digital media. Blake creates dreamlike, looping video artworks, often characterized as "time-based paintings," that combine elements of abstract painting, animation, photography and cinema.

Bill Davenport raves that his work does what abstract paintings always wanted to, but better! Relieved of the weight of history and the clichÈd idealism of high art, his videos are the realization of Kandinsky's dreams - tales told in an abstract language of shapes and colors, free to express surreal mysticism, without the mundane literalness of representation. Blake's DVDs for plasma screens, C-prints (original abstract images of fictional settings), paintings and drawings present visual narratives that combine the representational and the abstract. His vocabulary of liquid blobs and blurs, pebbly surfaces and sampled photographs morph to generate an endless techno fantasyland.

Since completing his M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in 1995, Blake has infused the art scene with his techno-industrialized work. Blake's works typically play with vibrant colors and organic and geometric forms. He instills a sense of neo-modernist design and film-like attitude combining the representational and the abstract.

Blake's most recent DVD, "Reading Ossie Clark," now being exhibited at the Feigen Contemporary Galley in N.Y., collages original film, drawing and still photography with painted and digital elements in a nine minute continuous loop. As a tribute to Swinging London's premier fashion designer Ossie Clark, the DVD presents his career from its prime in the late 60s, when he outfitted and entertained celebrities and socialites around the world, to its sad conclusion in 1996. Blake created animated forms inspired by Clark's colorful, stream-of-consciousness designs and his personal diary entries. With this piece, Blake pays respect to Clark's extraordinary fashion sense,and in the process, paints a dramatic, psychological portrait.

Blake is represented in the collections of several museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2002 he was commissioned to create work for director Paul Thomas Anderson's films "Magnolia," and "Boogie Nights" and "Punch-Drunk Love."

If you ever get the opportunity to turn on a Jeremy Blake "painting," be prepared for a unique transcendental experience that shifts you back and forth between the abstract and a stylized realism. His ambient, slowly moving abstractions will invoke a passive trancelike sensation and stir a pleasant, mild suspense that'll leave you wondering what's coming next.