Steve McQueen, Girls, Tricky

Coinciding with the opening of the Art Institute new Modern Wing in Chicago is the newly created Donna and Howard Stone Film, Video, and New Media Gallery. The gallery is the first devoted “black box” installation space at the Art Institute. Steve McQueen’s Girls, Tricky has been selected to be the space’s first featured work and is currently on view until August 2. The installations in the Stone Gallery will rotate approximately every ten weeks.

Steve McQueen is a prominent artist and filmmaker whose reductive, often abstracted works pare down the projected image to its basic elements: light and dark, motion and stillness, silence and sound. The meanings in McQueen’s intensely concentrated, exquisitely choreographed films and projected-image installations are at once elusive, elliptical, and subtly transgressive. Although his body of work is willfully heterogeneous, much of his production uses the language of film to examine distilled but coded actions, gestures, and performative expressions.

Modern Wing, Art Institute of Chicago

In Girls, Tricky, McQueen portrays the famous London and New York-based “trip-hop” musician/producer Tricky (born Adrian Thaws) as he rehearses in his darkened recording studio. Tricky’s frenetic performance locks the camera’s gaze for a single uninterrupted 15-minute shot. The result is an exquisitely intimate and sensitive portrait. The singer’s frantic delivery of emotionally and politically charged lyrics, together with McQueen’s minimal camera work creates a counterpoint to the commercial music video aesthetic.

Other Steve McQueen projects include Queen and Country as the official war artist selected by the Imperial War Museum‘s Art Commissions Committee. McQueen will represent Britain in the 2009 Venice Biennale.