Marc Breslin: "Refuse"

Performance Date: Saturday, May 7, 2011, 7pm-Midnight

http://www.festivalofideasnyc.com/program#event-630

As part of the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Festival of Ideas for the New City, Marc Breslin will debut a video at Scaramouche, Refuse, from dusk until midnight on Saturday, May 7. The video examines the daily movements of the Sanitation Department in Brooklyn. Shot over the course of several months, Refuse reveals the complexity and pace of processing the city's waste. It will be accompanied by a performed sound piece excavating William S. Burroughs's Dead City Radio, an album released by Burroughs in 1990 that superimposed some of the author's seminal writings over a variety of musical contributions by John Cale, Sonic Youth, and others. The video will engulf the gallery space and Breslin will remix Dead City Radio in real-time. Through these paired works, the artist reveals a city always reconfigured, always newly dead, and ever open to reconsideration.

Refuse will be presented in conjunction with Breslin's first solo exhibition at Scaramouche, "Casual Curses Are the Most Effective." The paintings and videos featured will further question the mediation of experience and representation in the production of history.

Marc Breslin (b. 1983) received a BA in art history and literature from Boston College in 2005. Recent exhibitions include a 2009 solo exhibition, "Newer Old Work," at Galerie Debaume, New York, and the 2010 group exhibition "Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art," at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (CCCS), Florence, Italy. The artist also produced a performance in collaboration with Amir Mogharabi for the exhibition, "Lecture V Paintings and Utterances" at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York. Breslin lives and works in New York.

Image: Marc Breslin, Refuse, 2011, still from a single-channel color video, 39:37 min.