VISHAL JUGDEO
Canadian artist, born in 1979 in Regina, Saskatchewan, lives and works in Los Angeles.
Vishal Jugdeo’s videos are typically animated by absurdist sets and props, which extend from the illusionistic space of the projected image into the real space of the installation, where they serve as a highly stylized index to the process of production. His brand of uncanny theatricality creates friction between the exteriority of the actors’ performances and the performativity of objects while remaining steeped in a perverse game of semiotics. The actors are given a script devoid of context and thrust into settings whose narrative associations are unspecified yet familiar, calling for an extemporaneous responsiveness, as opposed to a fixed, linear approach to character and story. Jugdeo has said, “I engage performativity as a way of unsettling the order of things, embracing the inherent unpredictability and potential volatility of live situations.” The slow, deliberate pacing of the scenes is mirrored by the movements of the motorized sculptural objects in the installation, whose choreography in relation to the video allows new and unexpected layers of meaning to emerge.
Since receiving a MFA at UCLA in 2007, he has exhibited widely including solo shows at the LAXART and Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles, and the Western Front and Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, BC. He has participated in group exhibitions at numerous museums and institutions including the Witte De With Center for Contemporary Arts, Rotterdam, NL, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Orange County Museum of Art, and the Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena. Recently he was awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Art Matters Foundation. Jugdeo teaches art at the University of Southern California and California State University Long Beach.
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FOR LOVETRIANGLE 2013 :
Vishal Jugdeo
The News and the World
2012
Diptych : Color photograph and black & white photograph on archival rag paper
25" x 16" and 25" x 14"
Signed by the artist and unframed
Ed. 5 + 1A.P
Edition 1/5 not available
Edition 2/5 available
Edition 3/5 available
Edition 4/5 available
Edition 5/5 available
Prices will be made public on the occasion of ART-O-RAMA art fair and Triangle France GALA, on 31 August, 2013. Online purchase will then be available for our members and friends!
ABOUT THE WORK :
The News and The World (2012) consists of two photographs, one black & white and one color. The black and white image shows a stylized set, most likely used for a live television broadcast such as the news or a talk-show. The set is empty, though a coffee cup and some sheets of paper are left on a desk, and the corners of a studio light and field-monitor on the edges of the image frame indicate that the set was very recently live. The set itself however appears almost too artificial, with a strange and ghostly quality in the photograph. The second image, equally allusive and uncertain, shows a dark street at night with several walking bodies whose activity is unclear. Obscured by a cloud of mysterious smoke, and heavy pixelation, the picture has the quality of a screen-grab from news footage. Where in the world is this? What is the nature of that smoke, and what exactly is going on?
This work is in direct link with a video commissioned by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, for the 2012 edition of the 'Made in L.A' biennale. Filmed on location in Mumbai India in collaboration with local actors, the video is structured around a series of highly absurd vignettes, most of which emerge from a stylistic and surrealist script the the artist has written. These tightly composed scenes are contrasted with what Jugdeo calls “formless” footage–raw, documentary style recordings on the streets of Mumbai, and improvisational scenes with the actors that register somewhere between rehearsal or green-room footage.
The News and the World, 2012