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The Eternal Quarter Inch

Jesse McLean

2008 00:09:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3DV video

Description

Rising fundamentalism and a government that cites faith to defend war actions have helped grow a desperate society. Dipping between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, this movie journeys to a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a belief system. An exhausted and expectant crowd waits on this narrow span. It is not a wide stretch, but it can last forever.

Part One of Bearing Witness Trilogy, a trilogy concerned with how we, as a culture, watch ourselves, especially in moments of great emotional significance. With footage culled from mainstream media and television, the single-channel videos (The Eternal Quarter Inch, Somewhere only we know, The Burning Blue) distill moments of sincerity from perhaps insincere sources (televangelists, reality show contestants, screensavers, B-movies). This trilogy puts pressure on the infrastructure of distributing images, particularly those that represent what might have normally been private experiences made public for the sake of entertainment. Located in interstitial spaces, these videos continually shift the role of the viewer between voyeur and participant.

About Jesse McLean

Jesse McLean is a media artist and educator whose research is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, especially as presented and observed through mediated images. Interested both in the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring us together, McLean's work asks the viewer to walk the line between voyeur and participant.

She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Venice Film Festival, Italy; Transmediale, Berlin; 25 FPS Festival, Zagreb, Croatia; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück, Germany; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Interstate Projects and PPOW Gallery, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Gallery 400, Chicago; Impakt, Utrecht, The Netherlands; CPH:DOX, Copenhagen; Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Kassel, Germany; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH.

She was the recipient of the Ghostly Award at the 2011 Images Festival and the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at University of Iowa.

For more information, see this conversation we had with Jesse McLean:  VDB asks... Jesse McLean.