This video artwork was made in collaboration with fellow artist and filmaker Max Rykov. It is a half-circle of active TV sets pedestalled on cinder blocks, anchored visually by mirrors, projection, and sculpture of a broken TV set. 

We used a variety of defunct Cathode Ray Telvision sets, for edited segments of captured video advertisements and television programming aired in the U.S. and Ukraine. Each looping video segments pedestal is stamped with stenciled messages making announcements and warnings about economic conditions and concerns.

Right behind these windows into the globalism of TV Land is the physical landscape from the post-industrial landscapes from Buffalo, NY USA, and Ukrainian Transit Bus Stops. The wide projection image is visually broken in half by a protruding steel column in the gallery. The shots themselves show cracked and worn down locations from the past boom of industrialism both in the East and West. In many areas of Buffalo schools and households are situated close by the ruins of decommissioned factories. In Ukraine, the bus stops were folklore mosaics that resisted Soviet policy, but have fallen into disuse and disrepair. Both places propsed a better future.

At the center of the site is a TV whose glass tube is cracked apart. Wires spill out from screen interior, as if to show how video media link us together. The landscape as it really exists outside the virtuality of video screens, isn’t our common space.The landscape is a distant backdrop and screens are the foreground. 

                          ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎

By bring back together discarded pieces of the past, we want to show viewers how an idylic future is presented while the ugly present is concealed. People are persuaded by future shown by video screens. But these images and  landscapes that were built in the past and remain as fragments. The televisions which were culutral staples of leisure and pinnacles of consumer wealth are as objectified as the cinders they sit on. The CRT screens are window to the nightmare of the past programs. Even now new visions of the future are being laid out while ignoring the ruined present. And even these programs for future will fall into disuse and will leave traces. Collecting these objects together forms a momument.