Jeremy Blake. Winchester

This is not the first time that Blake's work is displayed at the Museum. In 2002 it was part of the video series Metropolis Now that suggested a subjective confrontation between contemporary artists and the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang.

The artist emphasises the radical redefinition of the image, its potential, both creative and subversive, so that his works produce both a narrative and anti-narrative situation at once. In Blake's work there are references to cinema, in fact the artist produces several sequences for the latest film from director Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

The two pieces shown on this occasion have been produced by digitally and mix 16mm shots of old photographs, film segments, ink drawings and computer generated digital effects. The works revolve around the theme of a haunted house, the Winchester Mystery House. Blake’s pieces that are inspired by this house are like immersing into the predicament of Sarah (2002), an 18-minute looped film and the first work from the Winchester series, which premieres in New York that same year at the Whitney Biennale. The next piece, completed in 2003, is exhibited in Feign Contemporary, New York, a few months before this exhibition.

This is the first time that both pieces are shown together, which gives the spectator a greater narrative continuity and reveals Blake’s tireless renovation technique which he has inherited from traditional drawing and painting, but which he combines with film and computer technologies. The pieces have a cultural background from which Blake aims to confront how America mythologises violence. Even when the social component is expressed softly, the magnetism of the images emerging from futility continues to remove boundaries between the human present in fear, greed and death, and technology.