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Off Limits

Rea Tajiri

1988 00:07:30 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video

Description

Juxtaposing the text of Off Limits, a film made in 1987 about Saigon circa 1968, with the soundtrack and image of the last five minutes of Easy Rider, made in 1968, Tajiri parallel edits these representations to play with the evocation and emptiness of the image. Tajiri blacks out the screen image of Easy Rider while the words of a Vietnamese assassin crawl up the screen, building a structure of selective memory. Tajiri’s Off Limits points to the similarities and contradictions between 1960s hippie iconography and memories of the Vietnam War.

About Rea Tajiri

Rea Tajiri’s work plays with viewer expectations by employing strategies of media deconstruction to highlight the way images obtain meaning and how a viewer or reader supplies an image when one is lacking. Educated at CalArts and currently living in New York, Tajiri’s work draws on both American and Japanese images to explore issues of cultural representation, including material that is systematically obscured from these representations.