PAUL PFEIFFER

American artist Paul Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to investigate how media shapes our perception of the world and ourselves. Working in video, sculpture, photography, and sound, he is drawn to moments intended for mass audiences (live sports events, stadium concert tours, televised game shows, celebrity glamour shots), which he meticulously samples, dissects, and edits as a way of exposing the eerie emptiness that lies beneath contemporary existence.

ABOUT THE WORK:

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is an ongoing series of photographs borrowed from the NBA archive and digitally manipulated to remove all contextual detail. Part of another ongoing series, Caryatid (Rios) presents slow-motion video footage of a boxing match—however, one of the boxers has been removed, leaving the other solitary. The result of these works is uncanny: intensified, solitary figures float in strange, decontextualized poses in the center of each of these arenas, presenting the viewer with consistencies in the visual narrative.