100 screens host public art throughout New York City
Audrey Wachs
Public art on 100 screens now on view in New York. Pictured here: Hayal Pozanti, RELENTLESS TENDERNESS, 2017. Single channel video animation. (Courtesy Hayal Pozanti and Jessica Silverman Gallery / Photo by Jason Wyche, Public Art Fund)
Public art on 100 screens now on view in New York. Pictured here: Hayal Pozanti, RELENTLESS TENDERNESS, 2017. Single channel video animation. (Courtesy Hayal Pozanti and Jessica Silverman Gallery / Photo by Jason Wyche, Public Art Fund)
(Courtesy Hayal Pozanti and Jessica Silverman Gallery / Photo by Jason Wyche, Public Art Fund)
Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Crete Meat, 2016. Edited from Swinburne’s Pasiphae, 2014. HD video, no sound.(Courtesy Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Pilar Corrias Gallery, and Fredericks & Freiser/ Jason Wyche, Public Art Fund)
Antoine Catala and Gabriel Kahan, Understand, 2017. HTML website, mixed media. Programming by Nicholas Woodward; contributions by volunteers (Courtesy Antoine Catala and 47 Canal; Gabriel Kahan and MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology / Jason Wyche, Public Art Fund)
Kate Cooper, We Need Sanctuary, 2017. Still from digital video. (Courtesy Kate Cooper/ Jason Wyche, Public Art Fund)
When almost everyone stumbles blindly through the city, glued to a phone, a new series of digital works from the Public Art Fund is asking New Yorkers to pause their small screens to look at art on bigger screens around the city.
Now through March 5, the nonprofit will display Commercial Break at roughly four sites: the Brooklyn Barclays Center’s circular LED marquee; the Westfield World Trade Center mall in lower Manhattan; hundreds of porn-free LinkNYC kiosks; and on one of the most famous screens of all—a Times Square billboard. Notably, this is the organization’s first show to simultaneously display work in all five boroughs.
Commercial Break‘s antecedent is the Public Art Fund’s Messages to the Public, a series that ran on a Times Square lightboard through most of the 1980s, displacing the usual ads. Similarly, the 23 participating artists in this show interrogate the omnipresence of digital imagery, especially advertising, and its effect on real spaces, online and off.
The Public Art Fund’s website is the final venue—work by Casey Jane Ellison is paired with showtimes and more information about each IRL site.
