Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager

Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager are a Brooklyn-based^[1] artist team who make video installations for exhibition in gallery and museum spaces as well as in conventional cinematic ones. Their first official collaboration, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2008), serves to critique aspects of American society to music. Their work has been shown in Paris, Marseilles, New York, Madrid, Lisbon, London, Berlin, Beirut,^[2] and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.^[3]

Work

Two Russians in the Free World

Their 2014 piece presents a dialogue between the two men, while posing a deeper question: Why and for whom do artists create? Representing a range of transactions and exchanges, the video explores allegorical and utopian connections between artistic inspiration, love and the marketplace. The narrative telescopes out to include the story of its own making as the artist-filmmakers depict themselves debating plot line and meaning as well as the virtues (or lack thereof) of their collaboration. But are they really the ones in control? The mysterious presence of three women suggest otherwise.

A 30-minute prologue of Two Russians has been shown at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Showroom, London.^[4] The full 75-minute iteration was exhibited as an art installation at Participant gallery in the Lower East Side in spring of 2014.^[5]

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Their 17-minute stylized opera follows a family's move to a commune.^[6] Non-actors, including the artists themselves, performance artist Joan Jonas, and other friends, spew forth a chorus of voices (Moskowitz and Trager's singing voices) at an otherworldly tempo in scenes symbolizing contemporary life. The work's title, taken from the Aristophanes play The Birds, refers to the disillusionment that the family ultimately experiences: In 4th century BC the notion of utopia was also cast into doubt.

A varied mise-en-scène that runs the gamut from realism to artifice is also key to the atmosphere of the work. In particular, wall-sized photographic scrims indicating location are often positioned behind the performers in a way that claustrophically flatten volume. Plot line is advanced in scenes that are projected onto the surface of the performers’ bodies.

The social-conceptual boundary between art space and cinema space^[1] functions as a figure for the borders used to define social conventions of personal comfort and social safety. David Finkelstein of Film Threat described the work as a "startingly original and power vision of the film musical."

Cloud Cuckoo Land has been shown at 303 Gallery, Momenta Art, and Participant Inc. galleries, all in New York, and in Miami,^[1]^[7]^[8] and at "Les Recontres Internationales" in Paris (at the Pompidou Center and the Jeu de Paume), at Madrid's Reina Sofia as well as Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt.^[9]

The Story of Elfranko Wessels

This 2011 work which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam,^[9] tells the coming-of-age story of a South African man, the son of a white miner. The artists sing the voice of the talking head, Elfranko Wessels, recounting his story.^[10]

Queer Voice

A five-minute video named after the ICA Philadelphia show for which it was commissioned, Queer Voice (2010) starts with Trager's character "singing" Moskowitz's stream of consciousness on acoustic guitar. Moskowitz sings about shoveling "100 feet of snow" with her and gets caught up in his own competitiveness and commits a faux pas. The video then shifts to him "singing" some of Trager's thoughts while he cooks which leads to another awkward moment for the couple in a work about the blurring of identities in a relationship.^[11]^[12]

Awards

Grand Prize, Short Film, IndieLisboa Film Festival, Lisbon for The Story of Elfranko Wessels^[9]
free103point9 New York State distribution grant for Cloud Cuckoo Land^[6]
New York Foundation for the Arts grant, 2008^[13]
IFFR Competition selection, 2001

Earlier solo work

Erik Moskowitz

Prior to collaborating with Amanda Trager, Moskowitz made audio/video-based works which incorporated song, and specifically the voice, as a departure for examining cinematic and theatrical devices. His work was presented within both gallery and cinema contexts.

His work, Soft Version (2006) is a three-minute video about editing and “content creation.” An operetta which presents the editor (and artist Moskowitz) in the process of creating the film, it features an “editor” who edits, stars as himself in his own edit, and makes editing decisions which determine the outcome of his own narrative. Soft Version mounts an investigation into the ideologies of popular media production. The TV frame as object, image, and ideological construct collides with traditional cinematic notions of framing.

He has shown his solo work in a variety of places throughout the world including at the Impakt Festival in the Netherlands and at Experimenta in India.^[13]^[14] He is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and was involved in the Wooster Group as a teenager.^[9]

Amanda Trager

Trager makes sculpture, painting and installations embedded with prose text to create visual first-person narratives. Her works use character development as a way to talk about society and relationships usually with an element of physical confrontation through the work's scale. She has gleaned her texts from novels, newspapers, mistranslated websites, which she then changes or combines in ways that suit a particular piece.^[13] She exhibited one of these pieces at her and Moskowitz's show at Participant in 2014.

She has exhibited in a variety of places in New York, Paris, and Boston, her work curated by, among other people, Dan Cameron and the painters Elizabeth Murray^[13]^[14] and Nicola Tyson. She is a graduate of Antioch College.^[2]^[7]