Joao Onofre
dal 6/9/2006 al 13/10/2006
Segnalato da
6/9/2006
Joao Onofre
I-20 Gallery, New York
Thomas Dekker an Interview, and a new photo series from 2006. Onofre directs questions to him, always unseen but heard. In fact, Onofre framed the questions for the character the actor played in the movie - the alien child - but these questions are answered by Thomas Dekker as himself. The video is accompanied by a documentary-style photo series: Every Gravedigger in Lisbon, 2006; the show also includes Duration, Variable and Location Piece.
For his second solo exhibition at I-20 and his first in New York since 2002, Joao Onofre will premiere Thomas Dekker an Interview, and a new photo series from 2006.
This video consists of an interview with the actor Thomas Dekker. At the age of 6 Dekker starred in the 1995 John Carpenter horror movie - Village of the Damned - as an alien child. Since then he has continued his career as an actor, appearing in numerous TV series and some motion pictures.
Onofre directs questions to him, always unseen but heard. In fact, Onofre framed the questions for the character the actor played in the movie - the alien child - but these questions are answered by Thomas Dekker as himself; he was not made aware of what the artist was doing. Having worked as an actor since a very young age, Thomas Dekker’s life revolves entirely around acting and thus around fiction. This interview elicits a moment at which the actor, to a degree, is simultaneously immersed in the domain of fiction and playing himself.
In the horror film, a visit by an unknown life form leaves the women of an American village pregnant. While the town doctor (Christopher Reeve), the village minister (Mark Hamill), and a federal government epidemiologist (Kirstie Alley) investigate, the women give birth. With white hair and cobalt eyes, the children’s unusual resemblance suggests that they are all siblings. They begin to display powers that are fatal to some townspeople and do not bode well for the human race. By somehow veering from the pack, the alien child played by Thomas Dekker is the only one that survives.
Onofre’s video is accompanied by a documentary-style photo series: Every Gravedigger in Lisbon, 2006. Portrayed are men and women that work in this profession in Lisbon. Every model in these photographs wears identical sunglasses, thereby conferring a unifying look to diverse individuals and disrupting the gesture of the photo documentary genre.
The show also includes Duration, Variable and Location Piece (Unnumbered Extended Version), 2006, a work that reinterprets Douglas Huebler's most well known series of conceptual works of the same name. Onofre makes a cyclical hybrid, in part by using the summer solstice moment to photograph a young woman at two different seasons simultaneously and recasting a woman today who bears a striking resemblance to Huebler’s model in 1974.
Joao Onofre was born in Lisbon in 1976, where he lives and works. He was educated at the University of Fine Arts, Lisbon, and received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London. Opening September 6, his work will be on view in neo-con: Contemporary returns to Conceptual Art, at apexart, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Magazin 4, Bregenz (2004); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (2003); Vienna Kunsthalle Project Space (2003); and the Chiado National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, which traveled to Centro Galego de Arte Contempora'nea, Santiago de Compostela (2003). Group shows include Youth of Today, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2006); The New Media Collection of the Centre Pompidou at the La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona (2005); Animals, Haunch of Venison, London (2004); (Just Stand There!), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston (2003); Art Unlimited, Art 34 Basel (2003);
Strange Days, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003); the 49th Venice Biennale (2001); and Performing Bodies, The Tate Modern (2000).
Opening: September 7, 2006, 6 - 8PM
I-20
557 West 23rd Street, New York 10011
open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 AM-6 PM