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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 30, 2009

PRESS CONTACT:   
Andrea Potochniak
607 254-4563
arp37@cornell.edu

The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Presents
Omer Fast: Looking Pretty for God (After G. W.)

High-definition video from the award-winning artist;
Fast to speak at Museum

Ithaca, NY—The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University presents Omer Fast: Looking Pretty for God (After G. W.), on view from October 17, 2009, to January 24, 2010.

In his video works, Omer Fast ties together multiple factual and fictional narratives. In Looking Pretty For God this is done by overlaying footage from a photo shoot with interviews with funeral directors. He relates two very distinct industries by emphasizing their involvement in the construction of images. As images from a children’s fashion shoot at times coincide with the funeral directors’ descriptions of how they prepare the bodies of the deceased, these connections are made even more apparent when child models suddenly speak in synch with the voice-over, as if channeling the adults’ voices.

“While investigating the discrepancy between the audio and the visual in documentary media to comment on the mediation of images in the broader culture, Fast also reminds us of the transience of life, which has a long tradition in the history of art,” said Andrea Inselmann, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Johnson Museum.

Fast will lecture about his work on Monday, November 23 at 5:15 p.m. as part of the Johnson’s “Artist’s Talk” series. The talk is free and open to the public. This exhibition and talk have been funded in part by a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts.

Curator Inselmann will lead a free tour of the exhibition as part of the Johnson’s “Art for Lunch” series on Thursday, November 5 at 12:00 noon.

Omer Fast was born in 1972 in Jerusalem. His films have been exhibited in Vienna, London, Paris, Washington DC, and Minneapolis, and can currently be seen at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Lunds Konsthall in Sweden, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He recently received the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art 2009 in Berlin and was selected as one of ten artists commissioned to perform at Performa 09, the third edition of a biennial of new visual art performance, in New York this November. He currently lives in Berlin. 

Fast’s work was included in both the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials. He was selected from among the 2008 exhibition’s artists as the recipient of the Bucksbaum Award, the largest award given to an individual visual artist in the United States, for his widely acclaimed four-channel video installation, The Casting (2007). In The Casting, a young American army sergeant recounts two stories, seemingly from his own recollections. Fast weaves together two narrative strands—about a destructive love affair and the accidental killing of an Iraqi civilian—to grapple with the idea of individual memory versus collective history, and the fragmentation of truth.

The Johnson Museum has a permanent collection of over 30,000 works of art from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. The museum building was designed by I. M. Pei. Funds for the building were donated by Cornell alumnus Herbert F. Johnson, late president and chairman of S C Johnson. The building opened in 1973.

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The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, located on the campus of Cornell University, is open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free. The Museum is completely accessible for mobility-impaired visitors, and a wheelchair is available in the lobby. Metered parking is available in the lot next to the Museum. For more information, please call 607 255-6464. Visit the Museum’s website at  www.museum.cornell.edu. The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art is a proud member of Ithaca’s Discovery Trail: www.DiscoveryTrail.com.

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