Jeremy Blake

Jeremy Blake’s work transports issues relevant to midcentury American abstraction into the computer to contest the distinctions between painting and new media, drawing and graphics programs. In his DVDs Blake uses graphics programs to create transparent, glowing fields of color interspersed and layered with found film footage and photographs in a process he calls “time-based painting.” Winchester is a series of three DVDs that explore our culture’s obsessions with violence and family dynamics through recasting the stories surrounding the life of firearms heiress Sarah Winchester, who spent thirty-eight years building room after room onto her Gothic mansion in San Jose, California, to appease the spirits of those killed by her family’s guns. The Winchester Mystery House, now a tourist destination, has doors and stairs that lead nowhere and miles of dark hallways, in an architectural manifestation of Winchester’s obsessive conversations through psychics with the spirits. In Winchester (2002), the first in the series, Blake layers 16-mm static footage from photographs of the facade of the house with drawings that turn silhouettes of gunmen and guns into Rorschach-like ink marks. Layers of his characteristic digital painting seem sometimes like wounds, sometimes like nostalgic celebrations of the history. In a blurring of reality and simulation, of artistic gesture and real life, Blake takes us into the fear-filled chambers of American consciousness to remind us of the uncomfortably close relations between family, violence, and obsession.

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