Film Bidoun UbuWebAndrew Lampert (b. 1976)
#4 OKKYUNG (2004) #6 OKKYUNG (2004)
Andrew Lampert is at the forefront of a new generation of artists engaging with film, video and performance, revisiting and extending the dialogue around an expanded cinema. Lampert pursues the alchemy between artist, art, and audience in a public space, especially that of cinema. Bringing unscripted and chance elements into cinema's veneer of control, and often working with found material, he foregrounds the contingency of film as a medium. Reveling in cinema as a performative environment, Lampert reclaims this space from a mass media culture to emphasize its potential for immediacy and accident—and to make each of his screenings and performances a one-of-a-kind event.
Lampert explores the cinematic experience as content, experimenting with the physical spaces between projector, projectionist, audience and screen, and with the experiences made possible through their convergence. The cinema becomes a site of abstract and magical production in his performances, videos and films, as Lampert investigates the gap between an artwork's private intent and its public reception.
Lampert's media works defy strict categorization as films or videos. His projects are unified in their emphasis on the frame around the edges of narrative—the genres and clichés in which he cloaks on-screen action, the happy accidents during production, and the unexpected events during a screening that shape the audience's response and foreground human activity in the cinematic context.
Lampert was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1976. His work has been shown at the 2006 Whitney Biennial; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York; British Film Institute, London; The Kitchen, New York, and Light Industry, Brooklyn, amongst many other venues. Lampert's work has also been featured in a number of international festivals, including the New York Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. In addition to his work as an interdisciplinary artist, he is the Film Archivist at Anthology Film Archives in New York.
Lampert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.