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SEP24              THE FRICTION OF DISTANCE Jack Coventry

Quality presents New York-based video artist Jack Coventry’s new multiscreen installation The Friction of Distance. Responding to the material of the Quality’s black screen, Coventry distorts and degrades the film opposite, creating further distances between the film, content and viewer.

Coventry writes “All movement incurs a debt. Blinking slowly wears my eyelids down to a stare. Blink, blink, blink. The sound of movement becomes a command to expend energy. Disobediently, you stop blinking and your eyes begin to dry. Even those displaced flickers which seem instant, seem lazy, seem still, those movements too, have a price. What else is there when every action rubs up against the span of its performance? In sympathy for movement, I create facilitating distances: pauses between notes, separations of style, delays in processual control. Inevitably, like your eyelids, these gaps come together in time. Conflicting intentions begin to occupy the singular voice of expenditure. We meet each other, return to each other and say goodbye again. And let me say goodbye again, so that I may operatically annonce another distance between you and me.

In Transporting Visions, Jennifer L. Roberts writes about the complexities of transporting artworks in the 18th and 19th centuries; “every moving picture, in short, was subject to the inconvenience of “having to pass through the world.”” The knicks on the edge of a canvased landscape became part of its pastoral scene as transporational mechanisms were sculpturally intrinsic to the frame of a moving image. Our conception of the ‘moving image’ has shifted to a decidedly more fixed position with photography, film, cinema and video, and as movement itself is the central manipulation of these mediums, the marks of transportation have become more and more transparent. However, the adoption of a glass physicality means that the once resilient canvas could be lost in a fragile instant—a snapped CD, a bumped hard drive, or the combustion of a cellulose strip. Thus a miniature blemish creates disproportionate damage and the weak rhizome cowers in hidden servers, offshore solutions and underwater cables.”


Jack Coventry (b.1996) is an artist whose practice centers around the automatic and the generative. His works are often characterized by sound and moving image installations, which coalesce sentiments of assemblage, cinema and painting. Coventry maintains an affinity for puppeteering disembodied voices that echo the visual representations which they accompany. With a strong literary influence, this collection of constructed, historical and stolen personages narrate flooding countenances and invented documentaries. Most recently, he sings through me. Coventry lives and works in New York.