David Leonard presented three video works on a small TV monitor at Pro Choice on the 14th of September. This screening culminated several weeks of Leonard’s shooting at the very location of the Pro Choice space. A Los Angeles native, Leonard uses his experience of news journalism and video production as the medium of the work and does so considerably well.
In his art production Leonard’s success is twofold. The impact of Leonard’s medium of candid journalism lays bare a primarily blurred reality of existing media standards. The codes and societal expectation of which are everyday increasingly closer to the very social structure that it records and analyzes. This is the rhizome coded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux and here with Leonard’s work, it is conceivable.
Leonard painted the walls and floor of the public pedestrian passage adjoining Pro Choice and its two neighboring establishments a bright green. In doing so he builds a set to record his dialogues and unscripted interactions with random people off the sidewalk as well as a guest cast of Viennese artists and borderline local celebrities. In Pedestrian vs. Bicycle and Grüne Zone I, Leonard impeccably realizes his aim.
Pro Choice, Prater Hauptallee 2a, A-1020 Wien
07.09 – 14.09.11
- Ezara Spangl
