The National Academy of Design is pleased to present Media Relay: An Exhibition in Two Parts, featuring moving image artworks by six National Academicians – peter campus, Elizabeth King, Mary Lucier, Christian Marclay, Shahzia Sikander, and Carrie Mae Weems – each of whom has pioneered innovative practices in film and video. Presented in partnership with PS122 Gallery, the exhibition includes iconic media-based artworks that each artist has contributed to the Academy’s permanent collection – one of the largest collections of American Art in the United States – in a tradition that dates back to the National Academy’s founding in 1825.
The second half of Media Relay, opening on February 3, will feature work from a group of additional artists – Cecelia Condit, Kathleen J Graves, Tala Madani, Camila Rodríguez Triana, Stephen Vitiello – nominated by the Academicians featured in the exhibition. The criteria for the nominations made by the Academicians were simple: it could be a former student, a mentee, a friend, someone whose work they admire, up close or from afar. In organizing the exhibition as a “relay” – an invitational exchange between artists – the show enacts an aspect of community that is integral to the National Academy’s identity as an artist-led organization.
The Academicians’ artworks, in dialogue with the artists they have brought into the exhibition, broadly reflect on the effects of living in a media-saturated environment, the subsequent fragmentation produced by technology, and the surreal impact that the blurring of boundaries between humans and devices has had on both our waking lives and dream states. Presented in 2022, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, this selection of works poignantly reflects on our collective experience of the last two years – a time in which intimacy, isolation, and technology have altered our perception of time and our relationships to place and each other.