Marianna Ellenberg: January 20 through 30, 2011
With special event on Sunday, January 30 at 3pm

Chelsea Knight: February 3 through 13, 2011
With special event on Sunday, February 6 at 3PM

Amelia Saul: February 17 though 27, 2011
With special event on Sunday, February 20 at 3PM

Erik Bünger: March 3 through 13, 2011
With special event on Sunday, March 6 at 3PM

Patty Chang: March 17 through 27, 2011
With special event on Sunday, March 20 at 3PM

During the months of January, February and March, Momenta Art is pleased to present the 2011 edition of its annual Winter Video Series; 5 brief exhibitions of works recently added to its video library. Each exhibition, lasting two weeks, will feature a single artist. This year's artists are Marianna Ellenberg, Chelsea Knight, Amelia Saul, Erik Bünger, and Patty Chang. Momenta's video library program makes the works of over 60 artists who have shown at Momenta since 1991 available to the public for viewing. Visitors to the gallery may select and view any work from the library collection.

Events:
In lieu of traditional openings, the artists will present special events at the gallery every other Sunday in February and March. All events will take place at 3pm.

On Sunday, January 30th, Marianna Ellenberg will present an audio-visual lecture to demonstrate her working process and investment in the power of the acousmatic voice, along with assistance by voice-over artist Melanie Neergaard. In this lecture, the underlying themes of fourth wave feminism, the mediated self and rehearsal as performance will provide topical background to the two exhibition videos.

On Sunday, February 6th, Chelsea Knight will have participants from the project reciting their own lines from the video. This performance challenges the voyeuristic impulse of the gallery-goer by removing the divide inherent in a digital recording, and inserting the actual subjects into the space of the gallery.

On Sunday, February 20th, Amelia Saul will present footage taken during an 'introverted performance' previously held at the gallery. An 'introverted performance' is a six hour workshop devised by Saul including six to eight players who are both audience and performer simultaneously. The group, as a whole, will decide on all activities, though democratic majority is not a requirement for action. The product of this exercise is not pre-conceived and is completely unforeseeable.

On Sunday, March 6th, Erik Bünger will present the performance lecture The Third Man. Incorporating video projection and live performance, The Third Man explores the forces and influence that music and sounds have had on the world throughout history, imagining this influence as its own sentient being, The Third Man.

On Sunday, March 20th, Patty Chang will give a presentation exploring ideas of transforming the energy of spaces normally reserved for work. Using the incongruity of peaceful dreamers in environments that would ordinarily be full of frenetic energy and activity, Chang attempts to re-invigorate (or de-invigorate) these spaces and re-consecrate them as places of rest and repose.

The Exhibitions:
Each exhibition will last 2 weeks and focus on one individual artist.

Marianna Ellenberg will present Blossom (please!), a double-channel, live action video projection work. In this piece, scenes from Wes Craven's 1972 film Last House on the Left are re-performed in a stripped down seaside landscape.  The work re-edits a live rehearsal to reveal a close up view of female subjectivity as it emerges from the sadistic slasher genre to a bare bones video production.

Alongside Blossom (please!), Ask/Tell will be shown.  This split-screen video re-contextualizes the slogan "Don't Ask Don't Tell" from its weighty political signification to durational performance.  As the actress wonders aimlessly, repeating the phrases in a romantic landscape, the words ping-pong back and forth, detourned into meditative chant.

Marianna Ellenberg is a Brooklyn based artist working with the still and moving image. Her film/video and photographic work revolves around a re-imaging of female subjectivity and desire within visual abstraction and language play. Ellenberg's work has been shown both locally and internationally, at such venues as Orchard Gallery, Art in General, The New York Underground Film Festival, LA Freewaves and EMAF in Germany. Her video Suu A Fuu will make its London debut at Guest Projects in 2011. Ellenberg currently teaches in the Digital Arts Program at Pratt Institute and at Montclair State.

For Don't Tread on Me, Chelsea Knight collaborated with a multitude of participants, including members of the Tea Party, Ayn Rand enthusiasts, Libertarians, artists, and politicians, all with one thing in common: they are all in favor of capitalism. Through a series of interviews, encounters, Greek-style choruses and other choreographed ensemble elements, both fiction and documentary, the videos, photographs and performances in the show explore the way politics are formed and articulated on the Right.

Chelsea Knight (1976) was born in Vermont and lives and works in New York. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Knight recently completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a 2007 Fulbright Fellow in Italy. She is a current resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center's Workspace Program. Solo exhibitions include: The University of Syracuse, Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago, and the Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy. Knight has shown her work in group shows, screenings and performances at the Young Artists' Biennial, Bucharest, the 10th Annual Istanbul Biennial, Les Rencontres Internationales, The Kitchen, Art in General, NY, The St. Louis Art Museum, Werkschauhalle Gallery, Leipzig, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, The Academy for Media Arts, Cologne, and Mount Tremper Arts, NY. 

In Amelia Saul's new video, 8:15 or The Stench, she attempts to psychically connect to the spirit of the moment Enola Gay released Little Boy over Hiroshima: August 6th, 1945 08:15, Japan Standard Time.  This moment is chosen for its horror, its volume, and the paradoxical nonchalance with which one can speak of it in the present day US. 
In this action, she posits a conception of consciousness not, like you or I, located in a person made of matter traveling through time, but one made of time traveling through matter.  This 'single-moment-being' exists only a millisecond, but the length of its life could be measured with a ruler.  Its consciousness travels across the matter of its particular instant like a ribbon of flame traveling over a piece of paper. In this flip of the position of matter and time, much is up for speculation. Using (and teasing) tools of video art and experimental filmmaking, Saul pays homage to the intensity of philosophical and political discourse in cinéma vérité and the video art of the 70's and 80's. 

Amelia Saul is a video artist and writer currently based in Brooklyn. Her interest in contemporary art is rivaled only by a passion for foreign languages and travel. Between her years in school, she has lived for brief periods in Mexico City, Paris and Shanghai; for longer periods in Changhua, Taiwan, and Berlin. She attended New York University for her BFA (2005) and MFA (2010).

Erik Bünger will present The Third Man, a project existing both as a performance lecture and as a film.

As a child my father told me about the movie: In a city somewhere, a man searches for another man. Everyone he meets tells him that his search is in vain, for the other man is already dead, but he refuses to give up and suddenly he believes he catches a glimpse of the other man's face in a doorway. Then dad sat down in front of the piano and in his own tiptoeing kind of way he played 'The Theme from the Third Man'. It made me dream of footsteps echoing in back alleys and a great, green shadow flickering by in the corner of my eye. Every time I heard that melody I had the peculiar feeling of someone observing me from a hidden viewpoint.
-Excerpt from The Third Man

Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer, musician and writer living in Berlin and Stockholm. He works with recontextualizing and remixing media - appropriated from existing music and film - in performances, installations and web projects.

Patty Chang examines the psychic and physical spaces of labor and production. By juxtaposing images of workers peacefully sleeping or resting the spaces where they work, Chang explores how a space, specifically the workplace, is affected by the energy present in that space. This exploration serves as a kind of refusal of production through not working and maybe even dreaming. This work also highlights the potential danger inherent in equating production with progress and self worth.

Patty Chang is well known for her performative works, which deal with themes of gender, sexuality, language and empathy.  Working predominantly in video Chang initially uses the medium to document her performances, often utilizing the camera's potential to misrepresent. Her works often challenge viewers' perceptions of what they see, frequently creating visual sleights of hand that highlight fantastical representations of "Asia". More recently she has taken more of an off-screen role, shooting Shangri-La, a 2005 video documenting various attempts to recreate its eponymous subject, in the real life Shangri-La, a town in China's Yunnan province renamed in 2002 to attract tourism. Continuing in this vein, her most recent exhibition The Product Love-Die Ware Liebe, explores the real life meeting and interview between Chinese American actress Anna May Wong and German critical theorist Walter Benjamin as the premise for a pornographic film.  
Chang's work has been exhibited internationally.  She is currently working on a multichannel video with David Kelley about hair washing, modernization and a road built through Northern Laos.