Focus on James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Series Site

Raised in Maine and currently based in New York City, where he studied at Cooper Union, Wilkins has carved out a body of moving image work that combines conceptual rigor, an unerring ability to locate the uncanny in the everyday, and a bone-dry wit. A downloadable PDF of a public hearing in Alleghany, New York; a mysterious videotape that becomes the center of a detective yarn; reflections on the history of the toxic Androscoggin River; or 35mm publicity stills scoured from movie studio press kits… in Wilkins’s able hands these things act as launching pads for freewheeling, rhizomatic meditations on the photographed image, representations of race, the history of Hollywood, and American life as lived under late capitalism. A curated selection of the work to date of an enormously original and utterly unclassifiable talent.