School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Life & Death, an exhibition of works produced over four decades by pioneering video artists Dara Birnbaum, Peter Campus, Frank Gillette and Bill Viola. Curated by MFA Art Practice Department Chair David A. Ross, "the exhibition is an attempt to distill a central metaphor found in four very different works, each dealing in its own way with issues of transcendence and mortality." The exhibition will be on view at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26 Street, 15th floor, New York City, from October 17–November 17, 2012. Admission is free.

Dara Birnbaum is among the first generation of artists to appropriate television imagery, recontextualizing pop icons through fragmentation and repetition to expose the mechanisms of collective memory. By the early 1980s she began creating complex metaphorical video works, generally eschewing the use of found or appropriated footage. Her 1983 Damnation of Faust explores the eponymous 19th-century myth in a dreamlike, three-part introspection on the duality of interior life and the external world.

Peter Campus earned a degree in Experimental Psychology before taking up video in the early 1970s to investigate the role of the spectator and the relationship between illusion and reality. In his 1979 installation Head of a Man with Death on His Mind—produced shortly before the artist took a 17-year hiatus from making video work—Campus closely frames a face staring directly at the viewer, immobile except for an occasional, monumental blink of the eyes.

A founding member of the Raindance Corporation, the alternative-media think tank that published the influential Radical Software magazine beginning in 1970, Frank Gillette produces multi-channel video installations, photographic works and single videos. In his first new video installation work since 1984, Conjunction, he stages a conceptual faceoff by placing four identical monitors at right angles to one other: two display nature in its purest form; the other two the synthetic world.

Bill Viola began experimenting with sound and visual recording techniques as a teenager and studied visual art and electronic music at Syracuse University in the early 1970s. His 1992 installation Heaven and Earth consists of two exposed cathode ray (television) tubes separated by only a few inches, one rising from the floor on a narrow pedestal, the other descending from the ceiling. On the lower upturned screen we see his mother's eyes closed and in a coma shortly before she died. On the other, the face of Viola's newborn son is reflected in hers as is his in hers.

David A. Ross was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been active in a curatorial capacity since 1971, when he was named the world's first curator of video art at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Ross has contributed to numerous publications on the subject, including Video Culture: A Critical Investigation (Gibbs Smith, 1987), Video Art: The Castello Di Rivoli Collection (Skira, 2005), and Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide To Video Art (Aperture/Bay Area Video Coalition, 2005).


School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City is an established leader and innovator in the education of artists. From its inception in 1947, the faculty has been comprised of professionals working in the arts and art-related fields. SVA provides an environment that nurtures creativity, inventiveness and experimentation, enabling students to develop a strong sense of identity and a clear direction of purpose.