Video craft

Video craft explores the formal and technical properties that video, film, and early moving image technologies share with more traditional craft media like ceramics, textiles, and glass. Many contemporary artists have been drawn to video’s features, including its imaging technologies, usages of time, space, and (sound) aesthetics in new explorations of form making. In doing so, they have blurred the lines between the disembodied space of video and other, more tangible media, such as textiles, clay, plastic, film, and glass. There is a strong sense of materiality in these areas of overlap–where harnessed light and motion results in textural patterns and projections with haptic qualities. Craft practices have long been cut out of new media discourse—a trend currently being reversed. Through themes of encoding, looping, and sampling, Video craft takes terms usually associated with media art and expands them to examine practices by artists using a wider range of materials and techniques, many of which are rooted in craft history. Video craft brings together nearly 20 artists at different stages of their careers, from early pioneers of video production to emerging digital natives. The exhibition hopes to illustrate an unlikely partnership between the heavily embodied practices of craft and the ephemeral nature of the screen.