On View: 5pm – 7pm, Wednesdays – Sundays

The Yellow Line, a new four-channel video installation by Irit Batsry, inaugurates a new exhibition series at Monkey Town in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In The Yellow Line, Irit Batsry uses Monkey Town’s four-screen environment to surround the viewers with images of people behind black and yellow tapes used to mark the boundary of a film set. The margins of the set become the center of attention. The onlookers on location become the subject of this work as well as its “actors”. The yellow line-a thin separation between the quotidian and cinematic artifice-becomes a protagonist.

The poverty that dominates Brazil’s Northeast interior is apparent in the images Batsry recorded in the town of Iguatu, on the set of a new (yet untitled) film by Karim Ainouz (Madame Satã). But the people shown are not reduced to their economic and social circumstances. The Yellow Line is one part in an ongoing cycle of works that originate from material shot by Batsry on the sets of three Brazilian feature films.

The first in the cycle, Set, a multi-channel video installation and architectural outdoor projection was shown at the Whitney Museum in 2003-2004.

“(Ms. Batsry) displays an unusual ability to draw rich pictorial, symbolic and poetic resonances from the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, and she shows a sure grasp of the inextricable unity of form and content, or structure and meaning, that is scarce in contemporary art.”—Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 1/9/2004.

The second, Through the Looking, an exhibition including installations, video and photography was recently shown at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica.

The Yellow Line: produced by Irit Batsry Studio; curated with Montgomery Knott and Karyn Riegel.

Irit Batsry is the recipient of the prestigious Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award in 2002. She received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1992) and the Grand Prix of the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, Paris (1996 and 2001). Her work has been shown extensively in 35 different countries including shows at the National Gallery (Washington), the National Film Theater and the ICA (London), Reina Sofia (Madrid) and Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio). These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here), her feature length work, was recently acquired and screened by The MoMA (New York).