screaMachine Drive By 2001 4

"Drive-By" 2001

Presented i n association with Brooklyn Front Gallery and the D.U.M.B.O. Art under the Bridge Festival

The artist refers to this piece as a ‘video projection performance’. The emphasis is on the action and not the content of the video. The piece is titled ‘Drive-by’ because it is carried out in the guerrilla manner of a drive-by shooting. The audience is mostly approached unaware and have experienced the event before they really have time to take it all in.

The audience got to see random moments from a video sequence depicting Times Square being projected repeatedly onto a derelict block in Brooklyn. The block is surrounded by a continuous, corrugated, galvanized, iron fence, topped with razor wire. The car made approximately 20 laps of the block.

A slow moving, dark car with a rolled down window creeps along near the sidewalk, ‘shooting’ video images at all that gets in its path. The superficial images skim the surfaces and textures of the recipient walls and objects. The video image ripples as it travels along the corrugated fence. The highly pixilated image glistens against the dull grey, due both to the nature of the subject matter (Times Square’s sparkling neon, tv screens etc.) and because the metal fence reflects the projector light in all directions (the curves of the corrugation make for a full 180 degrees of surface to bounce off). The surface glamour and glitz of Times Square has been stripped and reapplied to the Brooklyn fence in a thin, ephemeral veneer. What once may have impressed the onlooker now shows itself to be just a cosmetic surface that is powerless in any attempt to cover up the desolation of the Brooklyn block.