Featuring members of the Video Artist League: Nick London Megan Kunisch Joe Pavelka Nagisa Wada Anna Yamamoto

The Video Artists League (VAL) was founded in 2000 in New York by a group of emerging video artists who met weekly to support each other’s practice and to create new work. As a group, VAL has been exhibited at the Canofan Gallery in Nagoya, Japan (2002) and the Living Room in New York City (2003).

Many VAL members have since moved outside of the video medium. Monster revisits the approach of the VAL group artists while featuring new works in video, sculpture and installation created to explore the concept of “the monster” in the popular imagination. Works in the exhibition consider ways in which the alien and the uncanny are framed by familiar cultural references such as “camp,” play, cuteness, and suspense.

Joe Pavelka’s work takes the form of a video game in which participants battle monsters on the screen and navigate an actual field of inflated red balls in the gallery. Megan Kunisch’s new video work, projected beyond this field, explores the notion of suspense and time as the viewer moves closer to the distant, projected image of a small girl. Anna Yamamoto’s hanging sculptures build on past work, in which hybrid creatures combine the cute with the freakish. Nick London’s new sculptures embody the potential for terror in the mundane, and Nagisa Wada’s new wall installation looks at the monsters all around us.