Jan Baracz’s Reality Cinema/Live Video transforms the storefront gallery into a cinematic screening room, inside of which a live video feed, mixed from three cameras recording the streets outside Art in General, is projected to create an ongoing “movie.” While the content of the “movie” is the action of the streetscape, a mixture of live, off-screen dialogue, an improvised soundtrack and occasional subtitles accompany the “movie” to create new and unexpected interpretations of everyday occurrences.

Potential “movie” scenarios include a few lonely souls in the theater on a rainy day looking out onto a wet, empty street as the occasional bicycle delivery zooms by or an exuberant, tourist crowd filling the theater watches kids cruising downtown in search of entertainment. As in the traditional cinematic experience, the defining moment of this spectacle will be the experience of the shared single viewpoint.

Reality Cinema/Live Video displays the “magic” power of electronic mediation. Addressing the conventions of cinema (the spatial arrangement of audience in relation to the screen, aspect ratios, etc.) and collective reception, the project also takes on the notion of “reality art” and the street spectacle that currently seems to be favored over a “movie” or an art experience. Employing curiosity and voyeurism, Reality Cinema/Live Video will playfully test our tendency to project narrative on everything we see.

Soundtrack by Toshio Kajiwara

Off-screen voices: Erika Latta and Eric Dean Scott

Sound performances by Zeljko Mcmullen, Patrick Mckearn and others.

For more writing on the project please see Benjamin Young’s essay about the installation Street Theatre

Jan Baracz is a New York-based artist working in sculpture, video and photography. A graduate of Bard College’s MFA program, and a participant in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York, he has exhibited widely in New York and Europe at P.S. 1/Clocktower Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Art Basel International Art Fair. Baracz has received grants and awards from the Asian Cultural Council, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and his photography has appeared in The Paris Review, American Letters & Commentary and Jane magazine.

The New Commissions Program is made possible by The Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners by helping libraries and museums serve their communities; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Jerome Foundation; The Greenwall Foundation; and Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro.