Jesse Aron Green a Willson Center Distinguished Visiting Artist

Jesse Aron Green is an artist working across a variety of media including film, sculpture, performance, drawing, photography and writing. His work has gained wide-spread attention because of the engaging ways it combines aesthetic innovation and probing historical inquiry. His subjects include gender, literature, poetry, power, sexuality, and psychoanalysis. After graduating from UCLA with an MFA his first exhibition was at the Tate Modern in London with his piece, Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik. The 80 minute projected video, presented with associated sculptural and photographic works, uses the book of the same name by Dr. Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808-1861) as a kind of score: the forty-five exercises explained in its pages are performed, in order, according to the precise set of rules and recommendations laid  out by its author. Although his book was very popular at the time, Dr. Schreber may now be best remembered as the father of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness are unique as a lucid, first-hand account of mental illness and psychiatric confinement (and were used by Freud to explicate a link between sexuality and paranoia). In the video piece, the camera that documents the performance of the exercises moves in a perfect circle around the action, traveling at a rate such that the duration of the performance (and the resultant video) is equal one full rotation of the circle. In the six years since that debut, Jesse Aaron Green has had exhibitions around the world including the Whitney Museum of American Art, CCA Ujazdowski in Warsaw, Halle14 in Liepzig, the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA, and MAMbo, Bologna. His visit is made possible with the generous support of the Willson Center. He will visit the Lamar Dodd School of Art from November 18th to the 20th, and give a lecture on the 18th at 5:30 pm in room S151 of the Lamar Dodd School of Art.