JAUS

JAUS is very pleased to We Can Pretend: Three Artists’ Takes on Hollywood Genre Film curated by Carrie Paterson.

This show case is an exhibition and screening of three visual artists who use psychological environments that emerge from film genres including horror, mystery, drama, and thriller, to reveal a crisis in the interpretive possibilities of the moving image. Two artists, Kurt Forman and Julie Orser, live and work in Los Angeles, and the third, Judy Ross, is based in Berlin but has also worked in Shanghai and Beijing, China. In the exhibition “We Can Pretend” the artists’ story lines interrogate the viewer as the ultimate maker of meaning, presenting the psychological paradoxes in accepting this responsibility. The seduction and pleasure of film is increased for the viewer even as its structural language is challenged and exposed. Equally committed to their own film’s formal execution, Forman, Orser, and Ross each deliver another seductive entrance to the world of moving images: they take the obsessive perfection of the filmmaker to its end in art making, critique, and new narrative possibilities.

The exhibition will be presented as a mini film festival with several screenings on opening night, July 7 with additional works outside the gallery space including a performance organized by Forman and a collaboration between Orser and artist Jon Irving. Works will be available to be screened during the course of the exhibition by appointment, and a closing night party will cap off the show.