Jacob Burckhardt, a filmmaker, sound artist and photographer, displays black and white photographs from the 1970s and ‘80s, while Traci Tullius, a performative video artist, exhibits an ensemble of new time-based video works.

Jacob Burckhardt’s formative artistic years coincide with the 1970s, when experimentation and concept reigned and visionary artists explored new methods for the stage. These ideas radiate from the small-scale photographs reflecting Burckhardt’s own participation in early Robert Wilson productions of “The $ Value of Man” and “Einstein on the Beach,” “Echo Ranch” by Jim Neu, Michael Galasso and Elizabeth Pasquale, and rehearsals and performances by Burckhardt’s wife, dancer/choreographer Yoshiko Chuma and her School of Hard Knocks. The images read as living artifacts, witness to collaborative encounters on downtown streets and historic venues such as St. Mark’s Church. Performers and onlookers read as a who’s who of the ‘70s avant-garde: Charles Ludlam, Lucinda Childs, Allen Ginsberg, Alvin Curran, Yoko Ono and others. Burckhardt captures off-the-cuff sequences that bring these experimental milieus, artistic circles and the moments of their discoveries intimately and vividly to life.

For Traci Tullius, art is also activity. Her videos document long-term, large-scale investigations into futility and the absurd using herself as primary subject. Through exercises involving uncomplicated endeavors such as walking or being caressed, Tullius peels away her own physical and psychic defenses and deconstructs issues and obsessions ranging from flag-waving and fence-straddling to malice and masochism. Her collection of new videos, titled “Slow, Hard and Simple,” describes not only process but outcome. Using monitors, projection and sound, this ongoing project is a flashing, discursive montage of impulsive action. In the spirit of Albert Camus, who wrote that “All great deeds and great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning,” Tullius compulsively searches for clarity and comprehension through disparity and irrationality. It is this contradiction, and a capacity for stoicism, that is at the core of this work in progress.