Bio

Inspired by the early media collages of Bruce Conner and Craig Baldwin, Animal Charm—a collaboration between Richard Bott (b. 1972 Louisville, Kentucky) and Jim Fetterley (b. 1971 Rockford, Illinois)—began using found VHS tapes to make video collages in 1995. With the advent of YouTube a decade away, the artists culled bins of dead and devalued media, including industrial and promotional videos, bargain vinyl LPs, and consumer-grade electronics. They then combined disparate footage, using early nonlinear video-editing software, to create unsettling and humorous works. The duo compose unexpected juxtapositions in an attempt to subvert the original intentions of the found videos and to expose their absurdity while eliciting new meanings from the detritus of culture. Here Animal Charm presents a two-channel installation projected onto objects and elements that deepen the disorientation, creating a context for viewing invisible media with respect to duration, attention, and scale, as well as an archive of the early works (1995–2005). This pairing brings to the fore advances in digital technology, but the duo’s analog aesthetic continually elicits memories of a seemingly distant time, nudging the viewer past stimulation and toward disorientation and discomfort.