Bodhi Obfuscatus (Allegiance)

New York
January 10-February 7 2009
Chelsea Art Museum

Michael Joo's work is represented by a multimedia installation with video projection, mirrors and sound. For Bodhi Obfuscatus (Allegiance), a video helmet, devised by the artist as the equivalent of 48 live surveillance cameras, examines every detail of a group of New York teenagers’ faces as they tell stories about their lives and attempt to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance.” In the video installation, the close-up portraits, at once representational and abstract, are presented as a dense matrix of recorded projection and reflected video imagery.

Joo’s video helmet is part of an ongoing project, which has been used to record sculptures in the examination of the relationship of science, technology and religion within institutional spaces. In this new work, the static icon has been replaced by living beings, themselves icons of adolescence, for a meditation on the uneasy balance between uncertainty and conviction that signals change.

From the Press Release January 5, 2009