Installation view Rorschach, 2002

In her first multi-piece one-person exhibition, Jenny Perlin exhibits four recent 16mm silent films, a three channel video projection and several series of drawings.   Three of the films Rorscach, Schumann, and The United States in a Chaotic World are animated from hand-drawn images appropriated from psychological evaluation tests, store receipts, maps, music scores, fortune cookie texts, gardening diagrams and the like. The psychological self-help histories, Taylorist strategies for labor efficiency and histories of US territorial expansion in the films thread together individual psychology and social, political and historical meaning, placing each squarely within the other.

Strip from Washing, 2002

The fourth film, Washing, pictures the 2002 lower Manhattan skyline through a window in Brooklyn. In a short loop the window is continuously wiped and washed by a single hand. That the gesture repeats over and over poignantly evokes the loss marked on the landscape/skyline, which is also a collective trauma endured by a society. Drawing connections between disparate areas of contemporary modern life to challenge the compartmentalization of consciousness, Perlin's hand-processed black and white films disarm with their beauty while quietly demonstrating the complexity of our current socio-political moment and making a case for questioning the status quo. Three series of drawings from which the films are animated are also exhibited.

Installation view Sight Reading, 2004

A worry-free life or your money back also premieres Perlin's new three channel video projection Sight Reading. In a structuralist vein Sight Reading depicts three professional pianists attempting to perform a piece of music they have never seen before. Each pianist is shown in a separate projection, and each starts the piece at the same time. They then continue playing at their natural speed. The work, Robert Schumann's piano concerto in A minor, is challenging, and the pianists make mistakes. After a mistake, the pianist's screen goes dark for five seconds, and their music stops, while the other pianists continue uninterrupted. Then the projection resumes, and the pianist continues playing. The more challenging the piece becomes, the more mistakes the players make, and the more the three projections turn off. In this piece, the editing itself becomes the taskmaster, the act of cutting determines a player's presence as performer. A screening of other Perlin films will take place Sunday, May 2 at 1:00 pm.

Still from Schumann, 2002

Jenny Perlin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is an MFA graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.   She is currently affiliated with Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam.   She has screened her works at numerous international film festivals. And in just the past year she has shown in numerous international museums and galleries including De Appel, Amsterdam; The Approach Gallery, London; KunstWerke, Berlin; Gallery Liquidacion Total, Madrid; and Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.   She was featured in Statements in the 2002 Art Basel-Miami Beach art fair. In 2002, she received a Finishing Funds Grant from the NY State Council on the Arts and was awarded a Humboldt International Film Festival Prize.   Perlin was awarded the Marvin Felheim Special Jury Prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival earlier this year.