Whitney Biennial 2017
Mar 17–June 11, 2017
Leslie Thornton and James Richards
56
Floor 3
Leslie Thornton
Born 1951 in Oak Ridge, TN
Lives in Brooklyn, NY
James Richards
Born 1983 in Cardiff, United Kingdom
Lives in Berlin, Germany, and London, United Kingdom
Crossing, the first collaboration between Leslie Thornton and James Richards, examines the status of the image in today’s saturated visual environment. Created in response to Bruce Conner’s groundbreaking film CROSSROADS (1976), Crossing is a cryptic collage of imagery drawn from both Thornton and Richards’s archives of original footage. The work is the result of an intense back and forth during which the artists concurrently edited materials from their bases of New York and Berlin to create a shared audiovisual language.
Alternating between kaleidoscopic grids of heavily manipulated imagery and sparse shots of traffic, figures, animals, and cityscapes, Crossing suggests primal connections between nature and technology and creates new and unexpected ways of understanding otherwise familiar images.
Screenings: March 17–19
Crossing, 2016
Leslie Thornton (b. 1951) and James Richards (b. 1983), still from Crossing, 2016. High-definition video, color, sound; 19:10 min. Courtesy the artists and Rodeo, London