For their first solo exhibition at the gallery, the artists have created a two-room video installation throughout the gallery space in which the viewer is challenged bodily by entering an inflatable sculpture that simultaneously serves as a macro and micro experience; macro when standing outside the inflatable and micro when standing inside. Membranes, bodily organs, and the translucency of plastic sheeting mirror the feeling of water and whales or something from the abyss. The monitor within the form plays a looped video of appropriated footage from Wes Craven’s 1977, The Hills Have Eyes and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws as well as the artists’ own animations and original footage of an inflation of a whale sculpture in the west Texas desert. By using two iconic works of cinema from an era of strife and despondency in this country and re-contextualizing into a current definition of strife and despondency, the artists emphasize our relationships to each other and to our various types of displacement. Whether a whale removed from its aquatic world, a hunted shark, a swimmer on the beach or a family on an RV trip stranded near a former nuclear test site in the Texas desert, we are all surviving somehow in our own right and existing only with the presence of our opposite counterparts.

Kate Burnet and Dan Woerner live and work in Long Island City as well as the desert in Terlingua, TX. They make videos, installations and other objects. As well as being artists in residence at The Space in Long Island City, they are currently working on an experimental documentary about Dark Meat, a 17 piece free-jazz psychedelic ensemble from Athens, GA.