Jesse Malmed – Mixed Connections
Jesse Malmed, former Poetlandian residing in the Great Lakes, returns with a program of video and performance. And then karaoke.
Endlessly languaging, cosmically commingling, psychedelically sampling, tonight’s show gathers paradise from recent (like, live) and older works. To wit: reshuffled cards, the regime of rectangles, meaning’s search for us, a film that never ends, video and the everywhere. As we say, the experiment is the work.
Or to Zagat a description from various [smart, cool] critics, “[t]he works can be dizzying to take in”… “[a] joke is being played on someone, though admirers will tend to possess a paranoid sense of humour and a heavy predilection for puns”… “it’s doubtful to be […] mawkishly reverent”… “[he] clearly takes joy in the strange and absurd”… “layer[ing] sonic and visual collages, creating the sense of straining between movement and an attempt to find stillness”… with his “typically droll and delightful deadpan style”,,, “he possesses the gravitas of a goofy rabbi”… and “his cinema come alive”… [t]here is no way to experience the work … passively”… “Malmed throws us into the experience of his ‘cinema’ and challenges us to think alongside him, watching for patterns and riddles that point us to something we either know well or haven’t yet thought of”… “[a] recurring theme of his work is the complexity of communication”… “simultaneously slapstick comedy and introspective drama”!!! “[i]s the artist simply playing us—or giving us insight to a higher truth?” “I’d like to think I understand, even if I clearly don’t”… “I won’t ruin the joke”… “Jesse Malmed will appear in person”… “heady stuff, and the humor manages to throw the ideas into relief while contributing to their flow.”
Jesse Malmed is an artist, curator and educator working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and laps over and under, Chicago and Milwaukee. Various pre-occupations include: Infinite Gesticulator, Disorganizer, Paranoiac Research Assistant, Choir Conductor, Cosmic Concierge, Junk Shop Salesman, Re-Titler, Poet-Comedian, Traffic Caller, Obstinate-Minded Professor, Bootlegger, Pro Bono Closed Captioner and Imaginary Television Host. He has free gaza performed, screened and exhibited widely at museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns and willfully entangles himself with the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, Trunk Show, Nightingale Cinema, Bad at Sports, Western Pole, ACRE and the idea container and cap/sticker/doorhanger/magnet/
