Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Dream Sequence, 2006. Installation view.
JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY
Directed Dreaming
March 4 - April 8, 2016
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Directed Dreaming, the third
New York solo exhibition of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. The show will open on March 4 and will be
on view until April 8, 2006. The reception is planned for Saturday, March 4, between 6 and 8pm.
In Directed Dreaming, the McCoys present four new sculptures that use movement to explore
anxiety. The title of the exhibit refers to practice of willing oneself to dream about specific situations
in order to resolve conflicts in one's waking life. The works in Directed Dreaming fuse cinematic, personal,
and historical images to become visual records of those conflicts, with the question of resolution left open to the viewer.
The McCoys' sculptures are fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and
moving sculptural elements. Camera views are sequenced to create live cinematic events. By exposing
the image making apparatus along with the projected results, the work explores both time-based and
physical reality.
The two major sculptures in this show expand on the McCoys' 2004 installation Our Second
Date by further exploring the artists personal history, fantasies, and memories. Second Date incorporated
miniature models of Jennifer and Kevin intercut with views of a meticulously crafted miniature scene from
Godard's Weekend. The works in Directed Dreaming splinter the couple's shared autobiography.
In Double Fantasy II (sex), the McCoys represent themselves as nine year olds, drawing on
a child's scant sexual understanding to generate fantasies of their adult selves. With this technique they
each reach back to a time when their ideas about love and sex were created from an amalgam of
observations from television, popular culture and playground gossip that was hopelessly far from reality.
In that these sources provide only the broadest of gestures, Double Fantasy II is an autobiographical
take on the importance of genre. Formally, the work is a two-sided sculpture containing miniature film sets
that fragment and isolate bodies at once fetishized and romanticized. The images captured by the tiny
cameras cut together quickly to form a stream of consciousness meditation on the elusive subject of
nascent sexuality and childhood imagination.
In Dream Sequence, the McCoys examine how sleep becomes a filter through which objective
reality becomes fantasy . The work consists of a two-sided, 3 feet in diameter revolving circle, each
side corresponding to the dream world of one of the artists. Using an obsolete trick of early cinema,
a partially reflective mirror superimposes the sleeping artists against mutating landscapes. The resulting
double projection physicalizes the dream worlds of each artist's psyche. Kevin sees a helicopter unloading
soldiers in a bleak landscape. Jennifer dreams of floods that segue into suburban resort swimming pools.
The artists abandon the cinematic idea of editing with its jarring ruptures and discontinuities and instead
set in motion a fluid self-sustaining world in front of the camera and in front of the viewer.
Included in the show are two wall mounted sculptures from the Clouds series that explore the
vocabulary of a unending one shot film. In Clouds 9 and Clouds 10, cameras are trained on moving
cloud formations to create suggestions of unknowable and yet moving and possibly ominous events.
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Dream Sequence (detail) 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 10 x 25 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Double Fantasy II (sex) 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 7 x 11 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Double Fantasy II (sex) 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 7 x 11 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Double Fantasy II (sex) 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 7 x 11 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Double Fantasy II (sex) 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics projected video output approx. 7 x 11 feet |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Clouds 10 2005 mixed media sculpture with camera and LCD screen 30 x 12 x 8 inches |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Clouds 10 2005 mixed media sculpture with camera and LCD screen 30 x 12 x 8 inches |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Clouds 10 2005 mixed media sculpture with camera and LCD screen 30 x 12 x 8 inches |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Clouds 10 2005 mixed media sculpture with camera and LCD screen 30 x 12 x 8 inches |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Clouds 10 2005 mixed media sculpture with camera and LCD screen 30 x 12 x 8 inches |
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JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY Clouds 10 2005 mixed media sculpture with camera and LCD screen 30 x 12 x 8 inches |