Artists Statement

Kinetic sculpture/video installation, (2011)

Andy Warhol’s real-time eight hour film Empire (1964) heralded the onset of structural film as an artistic medium; since taken up by Michael Snow,
Anthony McCall and Douglas Gordon, among others. Empire consists of an unadorned shot of the Empire State Building and captures what was the ultimate symbol of the New York City skyline. Simone Jones and Lance Winn revisit Empire from a post-9/11, post financial-collapse perspective. End of Empire is a custom-built, robotic projection machine that projects a 14-minute video inspired by Warhol’s film. The robot’s motorized camera arm enables the frames’ movement and projects a black-and-white video image of the Empire State building across the gallery wall and ceiling, and then reverses back to its original position to eventually reveal its disappearance from the skyline. Never seen in its entirety, the viewer has to piece together their perception of the film as it unfolds over time and across the physical space of the gallery. The projection machine, with its numerous progenitors – from 19th century optical instruments to Edward Ihnatowicz’s Senster – cheekily involves the audience who must move around the machine to fully view the image, thereby enrolling them in its forlorn search for the absent skyscraper.

• Simone Jones is a multidisciplinary artist working with film, video, sculpture and electronics. Her works question the nature of perception: she is interested in how we see and how we translate what we see through various techniques of representation. Jones graduated from the Ontario College of Art (OCA), with a concentration in Experimental Art and received her MFA from York University. Jones is an Associate Professor of Art at OCAD University (Canada) where she teaches in the Integrated Media Program. Jones has exhibited her work at national and international venues and is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York.
• Lance Winn’s personal work searches for the language embedded in processes of reproduction. From painting to robotic projection and three-dimensional modeling, he investigates a poetics of construction that attempts to speak to issues of mediation and technology. Winn received his M.F.A from Cranbrook Academy of Art (USA) with a concentration in painting. A professor at the University of Delaware, he runs the M.F.A. program and is faculty in the Center for Material Culture Study. Winn’s work has been shown in the U.S. and abroad and in 2007 was the subject of a five-year survey at the Freedman Gallery.

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