Pensées Aléatoires du Futur

March 14-17 2019 | Festival Videoformes | Clermont-Ferrand, France

I am extra pleased to be included in the 2019 edition of this long running festival, directed by Gabriel Soucheyre. It represents a truism of video art – that the fluidity of the medium is transformative. This year I have the pleasure to premiere Pensées Aléatoires du Futur, a work recorded in France with the support of Bandits Mages and the participation of artist Pascal Lièvre. Videoformes has been supportive of my work for a LONG time – and I find the artists and audience inspiring.

This 18 minute linear work does not attempt to predict the future but argues that what ever happens is a series of trifling decisions that have monumental consequences.

https://youtu.be/LVYGo7YrtQY

Sorry

March 14-17 2019 | Festival Videoformes | Clermont-Ferrand, France

Videoformes will present this 2-channel work in a manner that makes me smile – an unused storefront in the middle of town. Of course I love the blank white space of a gallery or museum, but there is something special about mounting a piece like this where anyone and everyone can experience it – even at night!

SORRY is a song sung by everyday people, as a plaintive cry for understanding. It started when I realized that I was sorry for being who I am (old, white and male – the patriarchy) but expanded when it struck me that we are ALL being forced to be sorry for who we are. In a pop manner, this work supplies the viewer with every reason to say “no” to being bullied and abandoned, while being dusted with some sly wit.

https://youtu.be/lAqZhFdQVSg

ALCHEMY

March 27, 2019 | National Museum of Qatar

In 2016, Bangkok's BACC held John Sanborn's largest one person show to date, Shifting Horizons. The exhibition explored autobiography through music, myth and memory. It also demonstrated the artist's ability to produce epic installations. Celebrated for his groundbreaking single channel works, Sanborn has demonstrated over the last four years a consistently innovative approach to installations. 'Alchemy', commissioned as a permanent installation by the National Museum of Qatar, is yet another achievement, comprised of thirty monitors and eight channels. In the company of such artists as Ai Wei Wei, Doug Aitken, filmmaker Mira Nair, John Sanborn continues to challenge his ability to expand the medium, so that it might make the world feel at ease within it.

NONSELF

June 2019 | Launch on the Jeu de Paume “Espace Virtuel” | Paris, France
September 17th, 2019 | Live performance event By John Sanborn at the Musée Jeu de Paume

I am honored to have been commissioned by the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris to create a new work for their innovative and popular “Espace Virtuel” – an online showcase of digital artworks. As I was considering how to answer the call, I realised that self-portraits are usually reflections of “what IS”, but never of what “is NOT”. So I decided to create “a NONSELF portrait” – a version of my life, concerns and the attributes of my soul – but formed by the negative space in which I live. In other words, everything I am NOT.

But as an unreliable narrator (I am NOT truthful) who knows how realistic this UNSELF is a portrait.

The Residents’ God in Three Persons 

January 2020 | Museum of Modern Art | New York City

For over 30 years I have been tickled to collaborate with the renowned music group the Residents. From the time we met, we’ve fond ways to merge our sensibilities in curious and disruptive ways.

Now comes a live video performance work we’ve been developing which will receive world premiere at the newly renovated MoMA in early 2020. The project is a new vision of a classic record album, God in Three Persons which tells the lurid tale of a disgraced evangelist whose forbidden obsession with a pair of conjoined twins, leads to personal damnation. Told in 12 songs and using 3 video projections, this evening length work is a breakthrough for us both, in style and substance.

The work is a new direction for me. While I have done live work (such as PICO) I am attempting a kind of visual storytelling using video projection and 2 live performers that will be both implied and explicit. Bonus is that gender queer star Jiz Lee has agreed to star as the twins. Should be wicked.

https://youtu.be/jIQhwFfP7mQ Rushing Like a Banshee

The Anesthesia Quartet

The Anesthesia Quartet 2018 | 4 video and sound installations of 4 channels each

I recently expanded my studio space from one room to two, thereby giving me a 600 square foot room that can blacked out for shooting, as well as a brighter 700 square feet room, in which to edit and showcase projects in progress. When I installed a quartet of portrait orientation monitors on I could quickly develop and play four channel works, such as “Give Me a Second” and “Mythic Status”.

I was struck at how pleasing the quartet format was as a way to balance and disrupt sequential images as an impressionistic story. Almost unconsciously I started a quartet of quartets; imagining the four works in one room, facing inwards and surrounding the viewer, created to describe a soul’s salvation. Each work has a tenuous connection to the others – one is a cry for help, another is a lyrical shadow play, the next a choreographic palindrome, and the last a game of hide and seek.

https://youtu.be/XrvTJZbNMb4

NUMB

NUMB | 2018 | 4 channel video and sound installation

Running down an idea by cruising through YouTube one day, Sanborn stumbled over a clip of a young woman playing a blistering guitar solo. The video was titled “Hot Chick Shreds” and the solo mentioned was David Gilmore’s classic second solo in “Comfortably Numb”. A combination of technique and deep passion, the passage is not easy to play, but the young woman tore it up.

This video lead to several more, all of young women displaying passion and outstanding fret work – a chorus of players all finding freedom in play. “There’s something here, but I don’t know what it is” thought Sanborn, and he downloaded the clips and arranged them, in sync, to celebrate how music dissolves boundaries, and provides us a release from our chains.

https://youtu.be/J9yWDglD7sQ