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October 9 - December 12, 2009
Illingworth Kerr Gallery | ACAD

Reception | October 9, 2009 | 5:00 - 7:00 PM
Jason Moran in concert | 6:30 PM

Glenn Ligon: Death of Tom and Untitled (Minnesota Massacre)

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter directed a fourteen-minute silent film version of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Thomas Edison's film studio. Harriet Beecher Stowe's five-hundred-page novel, was one of the bestselling books of the mid-nineteenth century, spawning dozens of “Tom Shows” – travelling stage adaptations and musicals with white actors in blackface – that were seen by millions. The popularity of the novel and shows ensured that viewers of the period would have had a broad familiarity with the book and understood even the truncated film adaptation of the text. Although the book popularized racist stereotypes for generations, scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. have begun to re-examine Uncle Tom's Cabin, claiming the book is a “central document in American race relations and a significant moral and political exploration of the character of those relations.”

In his video installation Death of Tom, New York-based artist Glenn Ligon focuses on the last scene of the Porter-Edison film, which depicts the death of Tom, the slave whose tragic story drives the narrative. Shooting on black-and-white 16mm film, Ligon sought to recreate the look of the Porter-Edison production. However, after the film was developed, he discovered it was a grey blur interrupted with out of focus text and abstract figures in motion. Intrigued by this virtual disappearance of the image, Ligon decided to use the “ruined” film, focusing on the mechanics of (re)making of the original production and the failure of representation.

Ligon will also exhibit a new work, Untitled (Minnesota Massacre), that addresses a set of 42 painted reportage panels from the late 19th-century depicting scenes from the infamous 1862 uprising by Sioux in southern Minnesota. The series was produced as an early form of moving picture entertainment intended to stir up sympathy and animosity after the massacre and displacement of white settlers by Sioux ‘hostiles’ in southern Minnesota in 1862. Ligon applies himself to the digital documentation of each frame to produce a new projection, adding a narrative text he has composed from various sources.

John Gerrard: Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008 and Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007

Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008, is an intricately detailed virtual representation of a large pig production facility. Its appearance documents a horrifyingly functional agricultural reality and illustrates both a contemporary denial of animal dignity and the reduction of contract between farmer and farmed to a purely technical, almost contactless process. 

Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007 This video projection is the extension of a single archival photographic image of a storm dating from the 1930’s American Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl event, which Gerrard associates strongly with the synthesis of oil and agriculture in the early 20th century, has been identified as a central player in the economic slump of that time, the Great Depression. No moving images of the original storm are known to exist.

Its production involved the virtual reconstruction, based on hundreds of the artist’s own photographs and reels of film, of a ten mile square section of Texan landscape close to the town of Dalhart, a landscape dotted with windmills, farms and fences. This documentation was subsequently enhanced by publicly accessible satellite and topographical data. Once activated, a virtual storm unfolds in a sculptural and constantly random manner within the reconstructed landscape. 

Production: Werner Poetzelberger. Modelling: Daniel Fellsner, Christina Pisl. Programming: Matthias Strohmaier, Helmut Bressler + others.