Active Denial System: Metadata 2016

Description

Metadata is a video compilation of various montages, frames, and long takes with musical arrangement by electronic composer Elise Macmillan. Resonating absences, but also brute police forces, this video contains clips from protests, scenes from 3D modeling environments, and drone scapes. These videos are networked across multiple screens that have been sculpturally shaped into a tall arch, asserting its physical presence like boding force. Embedded within one of the video sections is a poem the artist wrote about the ties the police have to slave catchers who then became police officers after abolition. The video also separately speaks to the artist’s own personal loss, affecting the video with an additional elegiac quality of the search for a missing friend. This personal grief is then linked to a more general lament for the continual domestic warfare within the United States, revealing a larger problem within legalities, which persists not to be rectified. -Vanessa Gravenor

This body of work dedicated to Virginia Anne Aberle (1987-2016)

Special thanks to:

Andrew Bailor, Stephen Bram, Mattie Cannon, Kaylen Carder, Jon Chambers, Kevin Clancy, Matthew Conboy, Ariel Cordoro, Eric Fleischauer, Danny Giles, Vanessa Gravenor, Steve Gurysh, Dwight Hall, Cornelius Henke, Josh Ice, Hyun Jung Jun, Anna-Lena Kempen, Nate Lorenzo, Barbara Luderowski, Elise Macmillan, Ezra Masch, Brendan Meara, William Meerdo and Linda McDougall, Mohammed Musallam, Michael Olijnyk, Bjorn Olsen, Emma Roetzer, Kara Skyling, Adam Welch, Aisha White, Zhucen Wei, Aron Grent and Sibylle Friche at Document Gallery, The Photography Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and friends at ACRE residency.