Description From:

"A Selection of Works from the Video Collection"

Steven Dixon (born California, USA) 1954 -
Lives and works in Stockholm. Currently Associate Professor of Art Theory at the National Academy of Arts, Bergen in Norway.

After receiving his doctorate in philosophy, Steven Dixon began to work primarily in the visual arts. His explorations in photography and film in the 80's delved into the issues of constructions of sexuality, identity and Otherness. His Vas Trilogy which included the films Authoritarian Frequency and Nosmaus Locution were both a critique of conceptions of gender and selfhood and an exploration of the fundamental representations harboured in the medium of film and video. In the 90's his work began to focus on the medium of video, installation and computer interactivity, and the placing of the viewer as subject and actor in the art piece. Looking at the intersections of language and image his video, computer piece Perfect Likeness immersed the viewer in a sound and visual environment which let the audience both interact with and have the distance to critique the hidden workings of our assumptions of language and knowing.

Within the years spanning 2001 to the present he has published the much acclaimed fiction novel, "The Man who Thought in Metaphors" (the second volume which is to be published next year), published a interactive DVD-ROM, ConJunction, worked on net and broadband pieces including "Ping", Channelling, and Letmecounttheways, shown many video/ sound installations and prints (Good Fit and Orders of Consideration), done live performance as with Sign and All gingerbread women must die, produced multiples, exhibited Objects, and made more straight-forward computer and video pieces as with his The Sign Film, Antal 24 and the prize winning documentary, and sometimes Installation, Invisible Girl. In the last few years he has come to integrate more and more of these elements into highly ambitious Installations, complex interactive video pieces and even live video performances which were broadcast via the internet. These include the installation, Margin (with objects, videos, computer interaction and a published book written by him); live video performances which include the hour-long Mendel's Last Strand, the bold and wry 225 degrees (which includes performance, NetArt, computer interaction, objects, prints, video and sculpture) which used gingerbread as its foundation, and the shocking and depressing Documentary Invisible Girl. He is currently working on the Installation, "It's a Bright, Guilty World" which will be exhibited in March in Stockholm and then travel on to various location.