Curated by Valerie Smith
This long-overdue retrospective will span the three decades of Chilean-born Juan Downey’s brilliant and idiosyncratic career. While training in architecture in the 1960s, Downey developed a series of electronic environments derived in part from his experience with Parisian kinetic art. By the early ’70s, he had become associated with the alternative media think tank Raindance Corporation and was creating pioneering video works that culminated in the ambitious projects Video Trans Americas, 1973–79 (made up of footage from trips to South America), and The Thinking Eye, 1974–89 (a series of experimental video essays designed for public television). The exhibition’s catalogue will feature contributions from curator Valerie Smith, Gustavo Buntinx, Julieta Gonzalez, and Michael Taussig, as well as selections from the artist’s own notebooks.
