SHANNON PLUMB

When the Sarah Meltzer Gallery closed in the summer of 2010, video artist Shannon Plumb was inspired by the opportunity to move her work out of the gallery setting and engage it with the public space. While she has been making video art for many years, Plumb only recently started presenting her work as public art projects. For her 2009 series The Park, the artist screened twelve short films in Madison Square Park in which she imitated typical New Yorkers—the tourist, the assistant—with humor and grace.

The “Window Series” exhibition acts as a cardinal step towards presenting a new series of short films to the city—as projections in real windows in Manhattan. While many artists struggle to release their work from the frame or pedestal, Plumb has decided to place her work within a new kind of frame, hearkening back to the old modernist debate about painting-as-window. Through the panes of each window in the show, we see a different character portrayed by Plumb. She becomes a woman wearing a burqa on a hot day, a man enjoying a sporting event, or a woman saying goodbye to her lover. Rather than seeing the full performance though, we are only privy to a restricted scene. Plumb moves in and out of our tailored view and forces us to imagine the unseen, to put together our own stories about the people we spy through the frame.

With youthful honesty, Plumb admits that she wanted to see what it felt like to embody these different people. “I knew I wanted to put one of those robes on,” she says about the burqa-clad woman’s all-black garment. “It was so hot that day,” so she incorporated into the film a fan that billowed up her otherwise demure garment, which resulted in a friend’s lightheartedly declaring the character “the Marilyn Monroe of 2011.” With little interest in feminist views or political rites, Plumb wishes only to allow her work an entry to the street, where people will experience it in the simplest of ways. She believes that truly successful work only “happens once in a while,” and when it does it is “like a firecracker that you light and it takes off.” This exhibition is only the lighting of a flame, an opening salvo in Shannon Plumb’s new dialogue with the public.

“The Window Series” is on view at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York, through April 10.

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