Feb 19 – Robin Deacon: White Balance: A History of Video

Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 15, 2015

Thursday, February 19th | Robin Deacon in person!

Robin Deacon, performance shot from White Balance: A History of Video, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Chloe Pang

Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Robin Deacon presents a stirring performance on the history and aesthetics of video. The title White Balance refers to the process by which a video camera is adjusted to account for differences in light. For Deacon, this process also suggests video’s capability to convey “a truer sense of what is being seen.” Using a series of outmoded video cameras and discarded tape formats, Deacon weaves together autobiography, fiction, and old recordings—home movies, artists’ tapes, archival TV footage—to explore the ways seeing and remembering may be transformed by the medium used to capture the event.

2013–15, US, live performance with analog and digital video, ca 60 min + discussion

Robin Deacon (1973, Eastbourne, UK) is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator currently based in Chicago. His interdisciplinary practice spans a variety of themes, including explorations of performer presence and absence, the role of the artist as biographer, and journalistic approaches to art’s practice. Since the early 1990s, his work has been presented at conferences and festivals internationally in Europe, US, and Asia, most recently at the Tate Britain, London (2014) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013). He is an Associate Professor in Performance at SAIC. His feature length documentary film Spectacle: A Portrait of Stuart Sherman will be screened at the MCA, Chicago in October 2015.

Robin Deacon Program Notes

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