(At Home) On Art and Spectacle: Artist Talk with Paul Pfeiffer

FREE
This program is online only (via Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook Live). Advance registration is required for Zoom participation, including the chance to ask the artist a question (time permitting). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the talk.

At a time when we are more inundated than ever with visual content across media platforms, questions arise about how we perceive images: Do we still see the violence of war and racial injustice? Do we see the labor of an athlete in the midst of a crowded landscape of audience and advertisements?

Working with footage drawn from the world of sports, Hollywood films, game shows, and other events intended for popular consumption, Hawaii-born artist Paul Pfeiffer investigates the role that the mass media plays in shaping collective human consciousness. His digitally-manipulated videos and photographs show us how we perceive the world around us and what we might be missing.

Pfeiffer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (8), which is in the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection, recasts the image of a lone basketball player reaching toward the sky. The other players, lights, and advertisements that surrounded him have been digitally removed, and only a distant crowd remains to watch as he leaps up, stretching into darkness. Pfeiffer reimagines a fleeting moment in a fast-paced game as a surreal, still image, one that reveals the laborious effort of a human body as it reaches for the heavens.

Pfeiffer joins Hirshhorn associate curator Marina Isgro to discuss his process behind creating videos and photographs that force us to pause and see elements of our world that might otherwise pass us by. 

SCHEDULE
6:50 pm EST | Zoom broadcast opens
7 pm EST | Paul Pfeiffer in conversation with Marina Isgro

CART (real-time captioning) will be provided for this program. If you have any questions about accessibility for this program, please email hirshhornexperience@si.edu.

This virtual event is part of Talking to Our Time, the Hirshhorn’s online series of free artist talks featuring a diverse group of artists and collectives. View all events!

This event is also part of #HirshhornInsideOut, the Museum’s initiative to bring art into your home.

 

 

Image: At Maculangan