Vitruvian Figure

source: biennalesitesuitecn

Paul Pfeiffer’s videos, sculpture, installations and photography dissect the role the mass media plays in contemporary obsessions with celebrity. In a series of videos focused on professional sports events, Pfeiffer digitally re-edited found footage, shifting the viewer’s focus. For the Sydney Biennale, Pfeiffer has created a futuristic sculpture inspired by the Olympic Stadium in Sydney, made in close collaboration with the architects of the original stadium, Bligh Voller Nield Architecture, Sydney. The model, eight metres in diameter, morphs the existing design that seats 80,000 people into a structure that could, if built to scale, accommodate an audience of one million. With its dynamic revolving shape, the vertiginous view inside and the revolutionary vision of its imagined audience, Pfeiffer’s Vitruvian Figure evokes a disturbing apparition of spectacle and pays homage to the modern visions of the first-century BC Roman architect, Vitruvius.
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source: pbsorg

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1966 but spent most of his childhood in the Philippines. Pfeiffer relocated to New York in 1990, where he attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer’s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness. In a series of video works focused on professional sports events—including basketball, boxing, and hockey—Pfeiffer digitally removes the bodies of the players from the games, shifting the viewer’s focus to the spectators, sports equipment, or trophies won. Presented on small LCD screens and often looped, these intimate and idealized video works are meditations on faith, desire, and a contemporary culture obsessed with celebrity. Many of Pfeiffer’s works invite viewers to exercise their imaginations or project their own fears and obsessions onto the art object. Several of Pfeiffer’s sculptures include eerie, computer-generated recreations of props from Hollywood thrillers, such as “Poltergeist,” and miniature dioramas of sets from films that include “The Exorcist” and “The Amityville Horror.” Pfeiffer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and was the inaugural recipient of the Bucksbaum Award, given by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000). In 2002, Pfeiffer was an artist-in-residence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. In 2003, a traveling retrospective of his work was organized by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Visual Arts Center and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
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source: ipsilon

Nas fotografias que Pfeiffer foi buscar aos arquivos on-line da NBA, o torneio norte-americano de basquetebol, algumas das maiores lendas da modalidade aparecem suspensas, num tempo e num espaço “limpo” digitalmente de todos os elementos que possam perturbar a contemplação absoluta dos momentos escolhidos, instantes que revelam esforço máximo, toda a energia do corpo e da expressão humanas. São fotografias para ver devagar. Que implicam algum grau de reflexão e uma certa predisposição.