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Best Is Man's Breath Quality (Split Screen)

Sara Magenheimer

2017 00:15:30 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Language, Sound

Description

As an ominous voice guides us through Best Is Man’s Breath Quality, we are confronted by dense and complex images and sounds that appear and disappear before us. From primates engaging with their reflected selves to glowing jellyfish drifting through deep and dark oceans, our visual perception of the human figure is decentered, leaving only the grain of analog and digital voices recognizable to our senses.

This split screen version of Best Is Man's Breath Quality was created for an installation at The Kitchen (NYC) in 2017. A single channel version of Best Is Man's Breath Quality is also available.

About Sara Magenheimer

Sara Magenheimer is an artist with a background in music whose work spans filmmaking, video installation, writing, and sculpture. She is based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the New Museum, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), OR; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including the Flaherty Seminar, Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, EMPAC at RPI, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Award, the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2020 and awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z leading up to and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book length work of writing, which is now in its second edition.  

See Also: Sara Magenheimer: An Interview

photo by Mary Manning