In the New Media room, Bruno David presents "INCARNATION". A film by Van McElwee. This will be McElwee’s sixth exhibition with the gallery.
INCARNATION was presented as an installation at Instants Vidéo Festival in Marseille, France in November2023, and premiered at Van McElwee: Score in Variation Space work at The Webster University Film Series.
David Finkelstein writes about INCARNATION in Lake Ivan Film Journal:
“What starts out as a fun social event ends up as a portal into a fantastic alternative world, a visual explosion of scintillating color and movement. The screen begins to resemble an animation of turning, shimmering, melting stained glass. The soundtrack of strange peeps and cries sounds something like birds and insects one would hear on a pleasant evening on some remote planet. It is in just these sorts of magical transformations that McElwee has perfected in his art.”
Van McElwee received his MFA in Multimedia 1978 from Washington University School of Art and his BFA in Printmaking in 1973 from the Memphis College of Art. Selected installations and one-person shows include: Anthology Film Archives, New York; ARTpool in Budapest; The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Art, China; Galerie Trabant, Austria; Rencontres Video Art Plastique in France; Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive, California; The Marsh Gallery at the University of Richmond, Virginia; Medienwerkstatt in Vienna and Ohio University Gallery of Art. Selected group shows include: The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Paula Cooper Gallery New York; The Long Beach Museum of Art; Ars Electronica, ZKM, Siggraph; Camden Arts Centre, London; Wexner Center for the Arts; Milwaukee Art Museum; Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo; ASIFA Austria, Museum Quartier, Vienna; Worldwide Video Festival at the Stedelijk Museum; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Art in General, New York; Digital Dance Festival, Seoul, South Korea and Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France. His grants and awards include: A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; St. Louis Regional Arts Commission Artist Fellowship; The American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Independent Production Fund (seven-time recipient) and a grant from the Government of India. McElwee’s work is represented by The Kitchen, New York, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis,Heure Exquise Center for Video Art, France, LUX, UK and the Inter Media Art Institute, Germany. He is Professor-Emeritus of Electronic and Photographic Media at Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri.
