Action Adventure is a group video show in the spirit of the Hollywood Blockbuster. The major part of the project is a 90 minute-long curated program of video exploring the influence of the movies in videos made by artists. Cinema provides a momentary escape for billions of people from the ordinary difficulties of their lives. It is a mass-produced language of imagination and emotions universally understood in our culture. The artists in Action Adventure harness elements of the movies to tap into this system. They reuse, rearrange, or redeploy the ideas and strategies of Hollywood in the service of art-making.

Jim Drain, Antoine Catala, and Jocelyn Shipley hijack cliché movie genres by creating absurdist parodies. Ryan Trecartin takes the narrative and processes it into something new and radical. Shana Moulton, Paper Rad and Scott Reeder create vivid character-driven stories. Abbey Williams pays homage to Kenneth Anger by doing a remake. Stina Wirfelt and Tim Etchells take on the stars. Rachel Mason, Marie Lorenz, and Lan Tuazon perform daring and dangerous deeds and document them. Tanyth Berkeley turns the camera on the audience and experiments with slow-motion excitement. Jeremiah Clancy, Julie Orser, Alistair Banks Griffin, and Cate Snook create moments of abstracted cinematic beauty. In a text-based video Trevor Shimizu catapults a 1909 manifesto into the future. Siebren Versteeg closes the show with credits drawn from a live-feed of obituaries from the Internet. Summer is here. Time to take a time-out from the high temperatures and humidity in an air-conditioned movie theater. Time to kick back and eat popcorn in the dark. Time to spend some quality time with slick multi-million-dollar Hollywood fantasies.