“This Action Lies” (2018)
Artist James N. Kienitz Wilkins (United States) film titled “This Action Lies” explores the limits of observation, about staring very hard at something while listening to something else. It unfolds as a mistrustful monologue analysing a common and underappreciated commercial product elevated through cinema to the status of a near-platonic form.
The work carries Wilkins’s style of combining documentary sources with original scriptwriting to investigate the role that narrative plays in the construction of truth. This style is most apparent in his existing works that are characterized by an economy of means, and span a range of mediums, from 16mm and Beta SP through to high definition video. Meanwhile, his films engage with issues that relate directly to his personal life, such as race relations in New England, where he grew up, or labour conditions in the digital age, which he contends with every day. The results are both funny – full of wordplay, wisecracks and ideas collapsing in upon other ideas – and provocative – peppered with matter-of-fact observations and fragments of uncomfortable truth that cut like knives.
James N. Kienitz Wilkins (b. 1983, United States) is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. His works are engaged with questions of language and performance, and how media technologies are rife with loops, failures, and abstractions. He conducts investigations into the life and mind of artists, explores race, money, and technology, playfully and thoughtfully posing tough questions about the features, mechanisms and operations of the contemporary world we tend to take for granted.
An alumnus of the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City, his work has screened at the New York Film Festival, Toronto (Wavelengths), Locarno, Rotterdam, Migrating Forms, Ann Arbor, CPH:DOX, MoMA PS1, BAMcinemaFest, Images, and beyond. In 2016, he was awarded the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In 2017, he was included in the Whitney Biennial and a retrospective of his work was showcased at Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montreal (RIDM).
Constructions of Truths is presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila in partnership with the Han Nefkens Foundation and in collaboration with Edouard Malingue Gallery, Kurimanzutto, Ruya Foundation and Silverlens.
Constructions of Truths runs until 12 April 2020.
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Read about the exhibition here.
Stills captured from the video
Artwork: James Kienitz Wilkins, This Action Lies, 2018
Sources: https://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/james-n-kienitz-wilkins-2018-09-19/
