Work by ECU grads featured at N.C. Museum of Art
The N.C. Museum of Art is hosting a video installation of three works by New York artist Jason Mitcham, including the “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” piece produced with Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers band. The installation will be in the museum’s East Building from Jan. 9 through April 12.
Both Mitcham and Avett are East Carolina University graduates.
“Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” is a four-minute, 20-second-long video Mitcham created from 2,600 versions of a single painting. It is set to the song of the same name written by Avett for the band’s 2009 hit album, “I and Love and You”. National Public Radio reviewer Robin Hilton described the video as “a spare but stunning work of art (that) shows the rise, fall and inevitable decay of rampant urban development.”
“These animations began from a need to incorporate time into a painting involving a specific site,” Mitcham said. By altering his paintings mark by mark, Mitcham is able to add both a sensation of time and the fluidity of movement to an otherwise static art form. To produce each second of running time in the video required him to create 10 alterations to the painting, Mitcham said.
Mitcham is a 2002 ECU bachelor of fine arts graduate from Greensboro who completed a master of fine arts at the University of Florida in 2005. Now based in Queens, New York, he has exhibited extensively in the New York area, Los Angeles and England.
Scott Avett is a 1999 ECU graduate. The Avett Brothers band had its start in Greenville while Scott Avett was an ECU student and brother Seth was attending UNC Charlotte.
Also featured at the Museum of Art’s installation will be two other videos by Mitcham – “Ruin Rising,” a video without sound he created in 2013, and “Three,” a 2011 piece featuring music by Meredith Varn. Those two videos also are created from thousands of variations to a single painting.
The museum on Blue Ridge Road in Raleigh is open six days a week and closed on Mondays. The exhibition is free.
– Steve Tuttle
Visit Mitcham’s web site at http://jasonmitcham.com/JasonMitcham/Home.html.
Information on the Avett Brothers is available at http://www.theavettbrothers.com/.