For his first museum solo exhibition, Chicago-based artist Max Guy presents an installation of new works centered on The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy’s journey from Kansas to the fantastical land of Oz and back again is a tale of slippage between worlds, imagining a reality with boundaries so porous one could be blown through them by a strong enough wind. Meanwhile, Oz itself embodies another kind of dual existence: as a highly developed fantasy world on its own narrative terms, and as a massively successful multimedia franchise that has deeply imprinted itself on the American cultural landscape.
Guy has selected this video by Curtis Miller for an online screening this weekend accompanying the exhibition. The video loops continuously, 24 hours a day, throughout this weekend: Jan 28-29.
The Dark Side of Oz, 1989 is a feature-length video that pairs three albums by the English rock band Pink Floyd with Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). First described by Charles Savage for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in 1995, for years the fan-generated mash-up The Dark Side of Oz (alternately referred to as The Dark Side of the Rainbow and The Wizard of Floyd) circulated among Pink Floyd fans through word of mouth and the Usenet newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd. The Dark Side of Oz instructs viewers to begin Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) at the first roar of the lion in the MGM logo at the beginning of the film, creating an unexpected synchronicity between an album and a film produced thirty-four years apart.
For The Dark Side of Oz, 1989, Miller reproduces the mash-up with an unedited version recorded from a television broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary in 1989 of The Wizard of Oz, found at an antique mall while storm chasing in 2018. The work generates additional unexpected overlaps with advertisements of the period, as well as displacing the conventional synch of The Dark Side of Oz. The Dark Side of Oz, 1989 is sometimes manipulated with subtle image alterations and karaoke moments. When The Dark Side of the Moon ends after 43:00 minutes (roughly halfway through the original film), the audio cycles through Pink Floyd’s subsequent releases Wish You Were Here (1975) and Animals (1977).
Curtis Miller is an artist from Chicago, IL. His work has shown internationally at the Centre for Contemporary Arts - Glasgow, EXIS - Seoul, Fracto - Berlin, Montreal Underground Film Festival, and Alchemy Film and Video - Hawick, UK, as well as domestically at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, ICDOCS, the Hyde Park Arts Center - Chicago, Indiana University - Bloomington, Gallery 400 - Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid - Chicago, among others. He is currently in production of a feature-length film.
Renaissance TV is an experiment, an additional exhibition space, and a tentative exploration of the potential for the internet to be a generative platform divorced from vertical hierarchies and classical institutional agendas. Conceptualized by Myriam Ben Salah with Karsten Lund and Michael Harrison, and inspired by the lo-fi aesthetic and assorted programming of television broadcasting, Renaissance TV hosts artist projects—newly produced and existing—such as films, animations, performances, sound pieces, mixtapes, and more.
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Renaissance TV is an online platform created to produce and host artists’ projects. It focuses on moving image and occasionally expands onto performance, sound work, and other artist-centered programs.
Renaissance TV is supported by GUCCI and designed by SPECIAL—OFFER INC. (LA & NYC)
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