september 15 - october 15, 2005

Omer Fast
“Godville”

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of "Godville", a new video installation by Omer Fast. The show will open September 15 and will be on view until October 15, 2005. The opening reception will take place Thursday, September 15, 2005 between 6 and 8 pm.

"Godville" is a two-channel video edited from interviews with eighteenth-century character interpreters in Colonial Williamsburg, a living-history museum in Virginia, U.S.A. The museum is actually a part of the historical town it recreates, occupying and preserving the town's buildings and grounds, while training and paying its residents to act out colonial American life.
The ten persons originally interviewed represent a cross-section of Williamsburg's resident actors: men and women of different social standing and origin; democrats and republicans; property holders and day laborers; militia members and housewives; part-time revolutionaries and slaves. All sat down to be interviewed in their work areas and costumes, usually eighteenth-century interiors and period garments. The interviews began in the past and in-character but deliberately jumped to the present and real life - sometimes making it hard to keep track of which of the interviewees' multiple personalities was talking or which century was being discussed.
By further cutting, pasting and remixing the interviews, a new narrative emerges whose temporal markers are blurred and where the two biographies of each speaker are blended into a single rambling whole. It tells the story of a town whose residents are unmoored and floating somewhere in America, between the past and the present, between reenactment, fiction and life.

"Godville" was shown this summer at Kunstwerke in Berlin. Simultaneously with the Postmasters exhibition, it is on view at in IVA (Institute of International Visual Arts) in London.

Born in Jerusalem and now living in Berlin, Omer Fast is considered to be one of the most innovative video artists working today. Through varied strategies of digital manipulation Fast's video work is drawing attention to a fine line between documentary and fiction, memory, perception, and history as reflected in the present moment in time. His past work explored the narrative of television news reportage ("CNN Concatenated," 2002) and Hollywood's treatment of social history ("Spielberg's List," 2003). A two person show "Mixed Doubles: Nam June Paik and Omer Fast" is now on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Postmasters Gallery, located in Chelsea at 459 West 19th Street (corner of 10th Avenue), is open Tuesday through Saturday to 11 - 6 pm. Please contact Magdalena Sawon at 212-727-3323 with any questions or image requests.