Michael Lasater
Statement Exhibition Notes
Statement
The subject of my work often derives from issues and processes of personal psychology, especially perception, memory, personal narrative, and the construction of meaning.
As an artist, I am primarily interested in composition in video, animation, and sound as a means of exploring, discussing, and objectifying ideas and concepts. But I am also interested in the exploration of media composition for its own sake; I'm interested in vocabulary, structure, technique, and methods.
Dziga Vertov (film), Anton Webern (music), and Gerhard Richter (painting) are representative of artists who have had a significant influence on my work. Vertov's ethos in his declaration I am cinema-eye, I am camera-eye , his development of film as a separate reality, nearly an alternative consciousness, have influenced my conception of media composition as a self-referencing language, much like music. Webern's serial work, in which every note is a planet, every movement a universe, suggests to me not only strategies for composition and structure, but provides a firm basis for confidence in minimalist time-forms or time-objects as vehicles of significant communicative power. I am enormously attracted to the work of Gerhard Richter, who often bases his art on photographs and other preexisting sources, and whose technique includes the ability to control radically different vocabularies, often within the same frame.
Exhibition Notes
All work is available for exhibition on self starting, self looping DVD's. Visions Fugitive, Crawl, Epiphany, Flight, and Contrapunctus are 16 x 9 HD compositions, and will be available soon in true 1920 x 1080 versions. Five Modernist Essays, Passing Figure, Persona, In tempo, and Billboard are 4 x 3 standard video compositions. These are available in 4x3 and letterbox (recomposed) 16 x 9 versions. HD compositions are available in progressive scan; standard video compositions are available in progressive and interlaced scan.
Flight is NFS, available for exhibition only from the artist's proof.
In exhibition, I have found that my pieces look best when exhibited on equipment matching the type of equipment on which they were composed. True HD compositions, noted above, are best presented on flat HD LCD or plasma screens, or on high quality projectors. My older, standard video compositions may be played very satisfactorily on flat screens and in projection, but take on a different, more vivid look when presented on high quality phosphor dot CRT monitors. Analog tube video is different from digital LCD and plasma video, and for some work, superior.
