PRESS RELEASE

Exhibition : RANDOM SUBJECTS, a solo show of video installation art at Harmony Hall Art Gallery, Harmony Hall Regional Center, 10701 Livingston Road, Ft. Washington, MD 20744. 

This interactive video installation explores art as public space in a post- 9/11 context characterized by challenges to individual rights posed by profiling and electronic technology. Like my other recent video installations - Datapaint, Surveilling Utopia (Greenbelt Art Gallery, MD, 2003), Application Center, Waiting Room (ART-O-MATIC 2002, DC), RANDOM SUBJECTS uses conceptual tools, multimedia technology, and viewer interactivity to challenge invasions of privacy sanctioned by the Patriot Act. At the entrance, an Arab American ‘agent’ (projected) asks each viewer for their name, address, race, … Live/ delayed/ DVD images of viewers and Arab interviewees appear in large scale projections on wall text, - lace, -red/white Stripes- minus Stars, as well as on scattered TV monitors; identities shift with backdrop changes. Muslim singing and taped interviews with Arab Americans challenge Eurocentric notions of citizenship. Delayed video - and audio present audience members with opportunities for control and response, even as multiple cameras suggest surveillance is anything but random.