Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989
Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special effects created by the artist. The early videotapes have been exhibited extensively in alternative spaces and museums, they are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.His early installation works are immersive dark-room environments with video, sound, and language mixed with colorful constructed sculptural elements. In these projects, Oursler experimented with methods of removing the moving image from the video monitor using reflections in water, mirrors, glass and other devices. For example, "L-7, L-5", exhibited at the Kitchen NYC 1983, used the translucent quality of video reflected on broken glass.
Projection: 1991
Oursler began working with small LCD video projectors in 1991 in his installation "The Watching" presented at Documenta 9, featuring his first video doll and dummy. This work utilizes handmade soft cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection. Oursler then produced a series of installations that combined found objects and video projections. "Judy", 1993, explored the relationship between multiple personality disorder and mass media. "Get Away II" features a passive/aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress that confronts the viewer with blunt direct address. Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer's sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating and lead to great popular and critical acclaim.
Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura. In his text "Time Stream", Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Oursler's interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to large scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.
Public Projects: 2000-2009
The Public Art Fund and Artangel commissioned the "Influence Machine" in 2000. This installation marks the artist's first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead. Oursler used smoke, trees and buildings as projection screens in Madison Park NYC and Soho Square London. He then completed a number of permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, Arizona including "Braincast" at the Seattle Public Library. He is scheduled to complete a commission at the Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria, New York.
2010 exhibitions
From October-December 2010, the Lehmann Maupin Gallery hosted Oursler's exhibition entitled "Peak". The exhibition is timed with Oursler's Valley, the inaugural exhibition of the Adobe Museum of Digitial Media.
The LONER: The Loner is a psychosexual journey through the dark landscapes of Oursler's insular narrative universe. The tape's paranoid, tormented protagonist — who is represented by such objects as a spoon and a water-filled sack — wanders through a hostile dreamspace of macabre obsessions and sexual alienation. Incredibly, Oursler renders this unlikely anti-hero as a sympathetic, totally believable "character." The artist's somnambulant, pun-laden narration and astonishing visual inventiveness add black humor to the surreal proceedings; for example, a bar scene is populated by an outrageous "cast" of found-object grotesques. Oursler's classic happy ending, in which The Loner "would live a wonderful life," rings with an ironic desperation.
http://www.tonyoursler.com/individual_work_slideshow.php?navItem=work&workId=19&startDateStr=Oct.%2019,%202000&subSection=Public%20Projects&allTextFlg=true&title=The%20Influence%20Machine
Influence machine: Installed at Madison Square Park, captured voices and images of ghosts, both contemporary and historical, creating a seance experience that recalled 19th-century sound and light projections. Oursler experimented with video, smoke machines, a variety of soundtracks, and several sculptural elements to explore the historical and current impact technologies have on our daily lives.
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