Matthew Buckingham: Play the Story
NORTH GALLERIES
July 12 – September 21, 2008



Matthew Buckingham. Everything I Need. 2007. Video installation. Copyright the artist.

In his films, photographs, and slide installations, Matthew Buckingham explores history and its narrative forms. Buckingham turns a critical eye towards the ways past events and characters come to be represented today after their material traces are subjected to political and social influences, anecdotal conjecture, and the multiple, coincidental timelines of history. This exhibition will present three new film installations, each centered on a specific historical figure: Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century woman of letters; Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman who invented a prototypical motion picture projector in the last decades of the 19th century; and Charlotte Wolff, an early 20th-century feminist activist exiled from Nazi Germany. Breaking away from darkened cinematic-like projection rooms, Buckingham creates specific installations for each work, underscoring the social, optical, and intellectual aspects of viewing film and art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 4 volume catalogue/artist book with an introduction by Krajewski, an interview of the artist with Godfrey, texts by the Buckingham, and essays by Cora Kaplan, Darcy Buerkle, James Steakley, and Tom Gunning.