17 Oct 2008

Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager at Momenta Art

Momenta Art is pleased to present Cloud Cuckoo Land (2008), a collaborative video and sculptural installation by Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager. The lead roles are played by Moskowitz and Trager with Joan Jonas, Robert Janitz, and Ronnie Bass featured in the supporting cast.

The seductive cinematography and richly layered music of the video will be shown within an environment of objects that served as a set for filming. These include a number of wall-sized semi-transparent photographic scrims that will describe a domestic interior within the gallery. The translucency of the scrims allows viewers to watch other viewers as they move between divisions, one room of the set bleeding into the next. Additional objects, with skewed proportions and unconventional relations to space, further dissolve physical boundaries. A more uncanny dissolution occurs when the characters open their mouths to speak. The timing of the footage has been altered to a dissociating effect. The actors haltingly mouth their dialogue, individual voices replaced by a unifying soundtrack sung by the artists.

The title of the piece, Cloud Cuckoo Land is taken from the Aristophanes' play The Birds, which first put the possibility of progress (and the goal of Utopia) into doubt. The narrative encompasses a family's move to a contemporary, progressive commune in which the central character is confronted by her own intolerance and inability to let go of the conventions of individualized life. The familiar boundaries to which she clings and the unclear spatial relations within the gallery coalesce and call into question how we envision comfort and safety both societally and psychologically.

In creating the work, these boundaries were actively tested by the artists. Trager and Moskowitz, themselves a couple, shared their home/studio with co-performer Robert Janitz during the period of time in which they developed this piece. Artifacts of this living arrangement, redolent of the mundane tensions of an unconventional 'family-life' remain in the installation, functioning as a nearly hidden narrative-within-a-narrative. These artifacts of a lived experience make Cloud Cuckoo Land as authentic as it is critical.

Erik Moskowitz received a BFA from The School of Visual Arts, NY. His work was recently exhibited at Freight and Volume, NY, Holiday, Brooklyn, and Le Sous Salon, Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally at Impakt Festival,Utrecht, Netherlands; Oberhausen 2005, Oberhausen, Germany; Moments Aristiques, Paris; and Experimenta, Bombay, India among others.

Amanda Trager received an BA from Antioch College, OH. She has had solo exhibitions at Le Sous-Salon, Paris; Bowery Poetry Club, NY; and Momenta Art (in 2001). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Triple Candie; White Box; Feature; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts; and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Momenta Art is supported by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, Greenwich Collection, Ltd., The Jerome Foundation, The National Endowment for theArts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The New York State Office of Parks,Recreation and Historic Preservation, The Andy Warhol Foundation forthe Visual Arts, and individual contributors.