Jeremy Blake: Century 21

The Art Gallery of York University and Trinity Square Video are proud to announce the world premiere of Century 21, Part Three of the Winchester Trilogy by Los Angeles artist Jeremy Blake, whose recent work has included a video installation in New York's Time Square, participation in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, as well as collaborations with acclaimed film director P.T. Anderson (Punch Drunk Love) and musical experimentalist Beck (Sea Change).

Century 21 will be exhibited at Trinity Square Video from10 July-13 August 2004. A public reception will take place at TSV on Saturday 10 July from 2-5 pm.

Jeremy Blake's DVD projections are time-based paintings, but the organically transforming images, which have the appearance of light-diffused colour-field paintings, embody allusive narratives that are psychologically complex interpretations of various histories of the last century.

Blake's Winchester Trilogy is a series of projections based on the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The projections probe the psychological aura of this architectural wonder constructed by Sara Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, over the course of thirty-eight years, beginning in the late nineteenth century. After suffering the crisis of the death of her husband and child and informed by a deep belief in Spiritualism, Winchester decided that the victims of the "gun that won the west" had haunted her. An advisor suggested that the sounds of never-ending construction of a sprawling mansion with staircases going nowhere, doorways leading out into open air several stories above ground, and miles of darkened hallways to roam would both accommodate good spirits and ward off evil ones.

Parts One and Two, which were shown at the Art Gallery of York University 12 May-27 June, probe the psychological emanations and hauntings of the building, first from the exterior (Winchester) and then the interior, after the building partially collapsed and was rebuilt due to the 1906 earthquake (1906). For more information regarding this exhibition, please click here.

Century 21, Part Three, develops its narrative by setting its social critique within the three cinemas that now surround the Winchester building. Whereas Parts One and Two demonstrated the traumatic effects of American mythical constructs (the gunfighter, the outlaw, manifest destiny, etc.) on the individual Sara Winchester and her compulsive building enterprise, Century 21 focuses on the fraternities that continue these frontier mythologies, repackaged and inculcated through the popular media and realized in contemporary wars.

Trinity Square Video is located at 401 Richmond Street, Suite #376 and is open to the public from Monday-Friday, 10-6 pm.

TSV is a not-for-profit artist-run centre committed to the presentation of contemporary video-based work and is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, The Toronto Arts Council, the Toronto Community Foundation, the Laidlaw Foundation, Cultural Human Resources Council, and Inkind Canada. www.trinitysquarevideo.com

The AGYU is a university-affiliated, public, non-profit contemporary art gallery supported by York University, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the city of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

Jeremy Blake: Century 21