SHANNON PLUMB: BLACK AND WHITE
Three Films, an Elevator Ride and a Peep Show

Room 01 + Room 02: Sara Meltzer Gallery is proud to present New York based video artist Shannon Plumb's first solo exhibition, Black and White. The four videos in this series are inspired by specific cinema genres: Film Noir, the Western, the Comedy, and the Peep Show. Plumb plays every "character" in her films.

Plumb references a variety of periods in film history, reaching beyond the four genres in this series. As a child, Plumb shared a room with her mother and together they would watch a small black-and-white television. Plumb grew up watching the Hollywood Classics: Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, Gene Kelly, and Shirley Temple, among others. When the family purchased their first color TV set, Plumb asked, "When did the world change to color?"

Black and White revisits the eponymous format of film and creates a circular dialogue within the history of video art, incorporating and updating previous conventions. Inspired by artists that explore themes of gender and the notion of performance, Plumb integrates a personal history into her films, using significant events as inspirations for new characters. She subtly captures a sense of nostalgia through the use of Super-8 film and its inherent scratches and blips. The unplanned instances and ambient sounds of "off screen" become welcome happenstance for Plumb and are often incorporated into the scenes. Plumb subverts the medium by presenting a humorous combination of character and self at once. If a wig or moustache falls off in the filming, the viewer is included in the joke. Reality is rendered with fantasy.

Video Wall: In An Elevator Ride, Plumb presents the viewer with a film that replicates security cameras' closed-circuit TV footage of elevator interiors. For this piece, Plumb plays close to 30 unique characters: a wildly eclectic range of passengers that come in and out of the elevators at differing times. The sense of simultaneous yet random action is reiterated as these images appear on all three monitors of the Video Wall. The public space becomes private; the rider stands alone devoid of inhibitions within the elevator. One empty elevator slowly reveals its identity as a set throughout the film, emphasizing Plumb's interest in the deconstruction of larger ideals.

This is Shannon Plumb's first solo exhibition at Sara Meltzer Gallery. Her work has been exhibited in such venues as the Lincoln Center Video Festival, The New Museum for Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). Plumb has recently been included in the Lyon, Lake Placid and Anchorage film festivals. Earlier this year she created a film with Fountainhead Films, Before Z. Screened at Anthology Film Archives, it is available in wide distribution.