Guarded explores chance, accident, and our precarious relationship to expectation. Two video projectors, two DVD decks and stereo speakers are all mounted on a rotating turntable that sits in the center of the gallery space. As it turns, the projectors throw images that follow each other around the opposing walls. The projections move across the wall much like the beams of a searchlight, revealing events, text and voices that are somehow already there, embedded within the space. Because one of the two video projections is always behind you, Guarded evokes the eerie sense that the most important events occur behind your back.
Bursts of text (modified versions of a document recently circulated by the Red Cross entitled "Preparing for the Unexpected") run through the images and around the room, sliding in and out of sight. A date stamp pounds future dates relentlessly into the wall, a child and woman follow each other around the space, a wedding occurs, fires burn, money is exchanged, cars are driven; little things become ominous, the monumental mundane. Together, sound, rotating projections, and text threaten a catastrophe made more ominous by efforts to avoid or prepare for it.
Since 1988, Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse have worked collaboratively on numerous experimental documentaries and multi-channel video installations. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, at festivals and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Biennial Exhibition, San Francisco International Film Festival, Berlin Video Festival, Toronto, and World Wide Video Festival. In 2001, they received a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. Additional awards include a Creative Capital Foundation Grant and an Artists in Residence at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Finley and Muse's film, video and installation credits include: Wing and a Prayer, 2002; Language Lessons, 2002; The Trial of Harmony and Invention: Winter, 2001; The Adventures of Blacky, 1999; and O Night Without Objects, 1998. These works have won awards at festivals such as the International Jewish Festival, the Charlotte Film Festival and the Black Maria Film & Video Festival.
Finley, a Guggenheim Fellow and Alpert/Cal Arts Award winner, is a Professor of Media Studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, daughter, and son. Muse is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Rhetoric. He lives in Vallejo, California with his wife and daughter.
The Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco represents their gallery work. Their films are distributed by the Video Data Bank
jeannefinley@sbcglobal.net
jmuse99@earthlink.net
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