Never take your TV for granted: the artists in the new Blow Up Your TV video exhibition at York City Art Gallery don't!
Curated by Janet Hodgson and David Mabb, this diverse collection of videos from 16 artists goes on show as part of Sightsonic 2002, York's digital arts festival, which opens in October.
Blow Up Your TV re-examines and explores the relationship between fine art and film as mediated by television and video. Presented on nine televisions, the work is organised into separate channels, one channel for each TV, with subjects ranging from comedy to desire and all the channels run simultaneously. Visitors simply move around the space according to their choice of viewing material.
The inspiration - and historical context - for the show is Andy Warhol's Soap Opera, a 1960s piece that contrasts appropriated TV adverts with Warhol's own drama footage to humorous effect.
In Blow Up Your TV, on the Pop Channel, Amanda Beech re-edits popular classics and turns them
into dysfunctional pop videos while Paul Rooney uses TV footage and his own music to make pop videos.
On the Desire Channel, Don Bury gives a homo-erotic spin to heterosexual movies and K R Buxey looks at the way desire functions. On the Time Channel, Janet Hodgson and Sheena Macrae play with time.
Matthias M*ller reworks archival documentary footage to create a Utopian drama with his own dedicated Documentary Channel; Christoph Girardet makes a loop from footage of a skipping gramophone for the Record Channel; Mark Wallinger turns TV around in more than one way with his Humour Channel; Peter Lloyd Lewis is the show's resident film critic and David Mabb and Abigail Reynolds parody forms of documentary on the Parody Channel.
Changing channels again, and Volker Eichelmann, Jonathan Faiers and Roland Rust have collected and collated film scenes set in public galleries for the Gallery Channel.
Two events in the gallery will accompany this exhibition: In Conversation with Janet Hodgson, Don Bury and K.R. Buxey, on October 19 at 12.30pm; and In Conversation with David Mabb, Amanda Beech and Paul Rooney, on October 20 at noon.
Blow Up Your TV, the first full-scale video exhibition at the City Art Gallery, goes channel-hopping until November 3.
Updated: 09:18 Friday, September 13, 2002
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