Closing: Nina Katchadourian, "The Genealogy of the Supermarket" June 24, 2005

May 21 ? June 25, 2005
Nina Katchadourian, The Genealogy of the Supermarket
and Other New Works
Opening Reception Saturday May 21, 6-8pm

Sara Meltzer Gallery is proud to present Nina Katchadourian, The Genealogy of the Supermarket and Other New Works.

Room 01: The Genealogy of the Supermarket is a 30-foot wide wall installation consisting of approximately 80 framed photographs of people who appear on common grocery store products. Katchadourian places each face into a family tree and creates an enormous, interrelated family. The faces on the family tree are at times instantly recognizable (for example Aunt Jemima, Emeril Lagasse, and Mr. Clean) and at other times hard to place, much in the way one might respond to photographs of one?s own ancestors.

These images play with the fantasies of lineage and heritage that these products themselves often provoke. This type of branding intends to provoke confidence through familiarity: one is supposed to think, ?my Italian grandmother made this pasta sauce" or "this beer has been passed down from the forefathers of my country." When seen in such numbers, the over- and under-representation of various cultural types also becomes readily apparent.

Room 02: Inspired by the posters advertising courses in ?accent elimination,? Katchadourian?s multi-channel video piece Accent Elimination involved working with her parents and a speech improvement coach intensively for several weeks in order to ?neutralize? her parents accents and then teach each of their accents to her. Both Katchadourian?s parents have distinct and hard-to-place accents, although they have lived in the United States for over 40 years.

The very existence of these courses speak to the complexities of assimilation, self-image, and the tricky maneuvering between two desires: to preserve the distinctive marks of one's culture or to decrease them in order to seem less foreign. In Accent Elimination, the accent is taken up as a material object, an heirloom that can be inherited. Although accents are in so many ways clear markers of ethnicity, culture, and origin (things that are linked to a sense of identity inherited from a parent), an accent itself is extremely elusive. In this video, one sees how Katchadourian and her parents struggle to hear and imitate what is so close at hand and yet so difficult to access.

Video Wall: The Recovery Channels consists of footage from loose video tape that Katchadourian has collected off the streets of New York and its environs for the past eight years. She often finds the video tape hanging in ribbons from trees, wrapped around lampposts or fire escapes, or on traffic islands, among other places. After being meticulously cleaned, restored and wound back into cassette shells, the footage is digitized and each ?find? of tape becomes a ?recovery channel.?

The viewer uses a remote control to channel surf a television that contains the cast off, unwanted, or perhaps shamefully thrown away material. The Recovery Channels comprises over 14 hours of footage on 38 different channels. The diverse material includes a Chinese action movie, hip hop videos, a ballet, an educational video on geriatric depression, an episode of Barney, and professional as well as amateur pornography (one of the found porn films has an ?art theme? that features a sex scene between a young museum visitor and a curator). As VHS players become extinct and videotape gradually disappears in favor of digital technologies, The Recovery Channels serves as a local urban archeology.

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