Attention 80s and 90s babies: an abandoned video rental store in Chinatown, New York has resurrected the large and in charge VHS tape we all know and love – and are giving it a modern art twist.
New Release, an art show curated by Half Gallery director Erin Goldberger along with Artha Project, features movie poster-inspired artwork by B. Thom Stevenson and Phillip Ashley, alongside a variety of video artists in the salvaged building at 60 Mulberry Street.
Th featured artists in this downtown exhibition created their own art videos and transferred them to VHS for the show. The exhibited contemporary artists include Peter Sutherland, Jeanette Hayes, and Leo Fitzpatrick, just to name a few. Their tapes are placed throughout the video store and viewers can decide which tapes to place in the scattered TV screens. The scene is very reminiscent of the days when you searched through the local Blockbuster trying to decide which movie to rent for the weekend.
This Chinatown video rental store was particularly chosen due to the historically social nature it brought to the community. The nuance of the modern day shop hopes to do the same, pulling people out of their beds, away from their computer screens and remind them of the days before you could lazily stream any movie with the click of a mouse. Unfortunately this is a concept that is lost on younger generations, but we can appreciate it for the experience that it was.
“All of my work… is inadvertently influenced by Hollywood, re-runs, basic cable, and past VHS rentals,” Ashley, a painter, sculptor, and video artist, tells a reporter from The Creators Project. “Seeing the horror movie boxes as a child was pretty influential to me visually,” he remembers. His images for New Release consist of abstract colorfully mutated faces that are painted onto plaster.
Additionally, New Release curators will host a series of screening nights with different artists and collectives over the course of the month of June. Everyone is invited to peruse VHS classics, watch curated films, and if you actually still own a VHS player, you can even take home copies the artist’s videos!
Half Gallery is an art gallery located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (43 E 78th Street) that displays a wide range of American works. The Artha Project is a privately funded platform, based out of Long Island City, NY, for the advancement of careers in the visual arts. Their mission states that they will provide artists with “direct, real time support” in order to enterprise their represented artists and curators with “the resources, education and support they required to prosper in today’s creative economy.” They pride themselves as being a group of individuals passionate about art as a community.
To find out more about New Release or The Artha Project, check out the exhibit or look them up on social media.
