MOCA Artist Film Series: An evening with Paul Pfeiffer

MOCA Artist Film series is an active and dynamic platform for the presentation of artist films. Inspired by film and video works in MOCA’s renowned collection, the series will offer engaging and notable screenings and live programs with MOCA collection artists and beyond. With presentations in the Ahmanson Auditorium, screenings and Q&As will feature artists, historians, and critics in dialogue with special focus on experiments in long-form, narrative or feature-length films. Centered in the cinema capital of the world, these programs will explore the critical issues of our time and our place.

For this special program at MOCA, Pfeiffer will present clips from his earliest video works such as The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998) and Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999). The screening will also include excerpts from his new audio-visual installation Red Green Blue which premiered in New York in 2022. The title refers to the image display system based on the human perception of color. The film considers how multiple channels of sensory information are brought into alignment by presenting the Georgia Bulldogs stadium as a broadcast studio.Following the presentation Pfeiffer will be in conversation with Nicole Miller.

A pioneer of video art and long interested in media imagery and the creation of spectacle in sports and entertainment, Pfeiffer has investigated the sports stadium as a site imbued with the potential to fortify national, regional, or community-based models of identity. The program will represent the development of his work over the past 25 years with an emphasis on evolving editing strategies.

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Museum solo shows and projects include Inhotim Institute, Brazil, 2018; Bellas Artes Outpost, Manila, 2018; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2017; Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii, 2016; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, 2015; Artangel, London, 2014; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, 2012; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, 2011; and Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2009. Pfeiffer has presented work in major international exhibitions in recent years, including the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. Pfeiffer lived and taught at the University of Georgia from 2016 to 2019. The artist lives and works in New York City.

Born in 1982 in Tucson, Arizona, Nicole Miller moved to Los Angeles in 2001 to attend CalArts and continued with a graduate degree from USC Roski School of Fine Arts; she still lives and works in Los Angeles. Recently, Miller has had solo exhibitions at Ballroom Marfa, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, the High Line in New York, and Kunst Werke in Berlin. She has also shown at LAXART in Los Angeles, and her work has been featured in major museum exhibitions such as Made in LA at the Hammer Museum, Fore at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Dallas Biennale at Dallas Contemporary. Last year she completed an eighteen-month project with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work is included in the collections of LACMA, the Hammer Museum, and SFMOMA.

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Brian Dang, former Programming Coordinator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.