If you’ve seen the DVD set Soundies: The Ultimate Collection, you’ll know my colleague Ina Archer, who did several of the on-camera intros.
Ina’s exhibition, Ina Archer: To Deceive the Eye, is now on view at Microscope Gallery in Chelsea. It’s a knockout–and the New York Times says so.
“Other Black artists, like Adrian Piper and Arthur Jafa, have made works extracted from Hollywood archives,” critic Martha Schwendener wrote. “What Archer brings is a canny sense of the bewitching potential of celluloid. Manipulating the archive into an art object, she seduces you into watching — and staring at — the appalling ways racism has manifested in cinema.”
This Thursday evening, July 11, at 7 p.m., Ina and I will be at the gallery for a conversation about her art—including her paradoxically beautiful works on paper and two moving-image works, “Black Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show” (2024) and “Trompe l’Oeil: Black Leader” (2023).
It should be a lively conversation! If you’re not able to attend in person, the gallery is live-streaming the event. Details on the talk and the exhibition here.
Hope to see you at Microscope this Thursday at 7.