Introjection: Tony Oursler Mid-Career Survey

Essays by Deborah Rothschild, Tony Oursler, Mike Kelley, Constance DeJong, Ian Berry, and Laura Heon. Interview by Elizabeth Janus. Foreword by Linda Shearer.

Introjection marks the first mid-career survey of the internationally recognized video artist Tony Oursler. Plumbing popular and punk culture for the twisted icons that structure our collective unconscious, Oursler creates fragmentary images and scenes that might belong to the hallucinations of a delinquent adolescent on a bad trip. The viewer is left to imagine what ungodly narrative was frozen in time to create such surreal, but somehow uncomfortably familiar, mayhem. Though darkly humorous, his work, known to most for his use of sculptural rag dolls onto which he projects the video image of a human face, delves deeply into the question of how the twinned forces of sex and violence, gender and power function in our culture. This catalogue traces the evolution of Oursler's career from early single channel videos through his current mixed-media installations and experiments in digital media. Combining sculpture, video, performance, and text, Oursler's work addresses complex contemporary issues with empathy, insight, and wit. Also included are four critical essays, two interviews, an essay by the artist as well as a comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography.

"Oursler's spectral characters exhibit the unidimensional persona of the crazed or possessed. Narcissistically fixated by the glare that animates them, they take on hallucinatory appearances reminiscent of phantoms, poltergeists, grotesques and ghouls, the archetypal protagonists not only of nightmares but of the modern genres of horror and their timeless predecessors, folk tales: all sanctioned collective repositories for the repressed and suppressed." Lynne Cooke, Parkett

Tony Oursler was born in 1957 in upstate New York. He studied at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York, and received his B.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts, Valencia. Oursler's videotapes and installations have been widely exhibited internationally, including one-person shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). His work has been featured in many group shows including exhibitions at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Amsterdam; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Tate Gallery, London. His work was included in the most recent Whitney Biennial and in both Documenta 9 and 10. Oursler currently lives and works in New York.