Glen Fogel

Compelled by recent political tensions and the desire to illuminate them, Glen Fogel’s new video documents the Billy Graham Crusade that took place at Flushing Meadows in the Summer of 2005. Focusing on Graham’s warm up act, a Christian rock group, the video frames audience members in the foreground against enormous monitors broadcasting a live edit of the performances. This hallucinatory footage, a kind of “found spectacle,” resembles a construct of virtual, blue-screen reality, and is further abstracted by Fogel’s edits and effects. This work maintains the artist’s concern for transforming extreme states of being, but by focusing on a vast audience instead of on video portraiture (as in his previous work), Fogel extends his transformations in a manner that destabilizes the visual field to a point where a simple representation of the world can no longer support a constantly evolving reality.

Glen Fogel was born in 1977 in Denver, Colorado. He studied film/cultural studies at McGill University in Montreal before moving to New York in 1998. He recently had a solo show at Galeria Andre Viana in Portugal, and his work has been exhibited at Artists Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002 Biennial), The Toronto International Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Lincoln Center among others.