Plug In ICA is pleased to present the deeply haunting and rich film Winchester by Jeremy Blake as part of the group exhibition Further Than I Can Throw A Stone.

Jeremy Blake was an American artist renowned for producing “time-based paintings,” wildly colourful digital projections that featured figurative elements blending into abstraction to illustrate psychological narratives. Drawn to speculative architecture and images borrowed from “Hollywood’s psychic dustbin,” Blake created hybrids of new media work. He is well-known for his illusory animations in the awkward and celebrated comedy Punch Drunk Love. 

Winchester is part of a trilogy of video animations that combine 8mm film footage, static 16mm shots of old photographs, hundreds of ink drawings, and intricate frame-by-frame digital drawings. It is the first in the series that abstractly tells the story of Sarah Winchester the heiress who married into the Winchester gun fortune. The ghosts of those killed with rifles made and sold by her family haunted her.  It is rumored that to welcome the spirits, she continuously built rooms onto her mansion in San Jose, California ever expanding her already massive home, adding additions ceaselessly for over 30 years. Through animated colour fields over-laid onto black and white images of the Winchester Mansion, Jeremy Blake creates a hypnotic and penetrating experience that reflects a troubling mind and captures its physical manifestation.

Jeremy Blake was a Los-Angeles based artist recognized for his lush “moving paintings”, which mixed abstract painting and digital film. His work was repeatedly selected for Whitney Biennial between 2000 and 2004. Some of his most famed projects include a digital animation for the film Punch-Drunk Love (2002), a music video production for Beck’s song Round the Bend, and TheWinchester Trilogy. Blake exhibited internationally at venues including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris; Galerie Tanit, München, Germany; Tate Modern, London; Art Basel 2000, Basel, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

This marks the end of end of Further Than I Can Throw A Stone. Over the duration of the exhibition, a selection of works by a diverse and international group of artist is presented sequentially as stand alone artworks, each projected for one week at a time. They are joined through medium and an interplay of performance and biography.

Cécile B. Evans, Trilogy (January 22 – 31) • Kelly Mark, 108 Leyton Ave (February 1 – 7) • Lisa Jackson, SAVAGE (February 8 – 14) • Erika Vogt, Darker Imposter (February 15 – 21) • Erica Eyres, Autobiography I and II (February 22 – 28) • John Bock, Bauchhöhle bauchen(February 29 – March 6) • Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tristan Bera, Belle comme le jour(March 7 – 13) • Karrabing Film Collective, Windjarrameru, the Stealing C*nt$ (March 14 – 20) • John Knight, MacGuffin 8 -2975 (March 21 – 27) • Jeremy Blake, Winchester (March 28 to April 3).

Plug In ICA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of our 2016 and 2017 program, and we extend gratitude to The Winnipeg Foundation and all our generous donors, valued members and dedicated volunteers.

For general information please contact: info@plugin.org

For media inquiries please contact: Janique Vigier at janique@plugin.org or by phone at (204) 942-1043 ext. 27