Daniel Wang and Lindsey Lascaux-Martha's Video

Martha’s Video

Daniel Wang x Lindsey Lascaux

At Martha’s POP UP location: 706 N. Lamar Blvd

July 14- August 12th 2023

Would you download a car? In the Streaming Era, wherein Zillennials have cut their figurative cable cords in exchange for seemingly-endless on-demand content, the anti-piracy PSAs and pre-film FBI warnings of the 2000s might feel like ancient artifacts. Graphics created in conjunction with the Motion Picture Association of America in an attempt to curb the dotcom boom of bootleg movie recordings from China and Malaysia (the same MPAA who might have sent you a cease and desist letter for downloading Avatar, the most pirated movie of all time), the ubiquitous block of text promises $250,000 fines set against retina-searing colors ran at the beginning of all legally produced movie recording copies.

Lindsey Lascaux and Daniel Wang approach the rapidly changing moviegoing experience through paintings, prints, and mixed media in celebration of the bootlegged copy as a vehicle of mutual aid in the face of streaming-era privatization. In a time in which we must agree to data mining to access digital entertainment, in which watching movies at home likely means permanently selling one's own data for temporary access to a massive library of middling entertainment, Wang and Lascaux miss the mall movie theatre and The Pirate Bay. Bootlegging their own memories by mixing materials, altering appearances, refusing to research or otherwise ripping off directly, and employing AI to incorporate phoned-in knock-offs, the artists present paintings, digital work, and fictitious alternative histories which wrestle with the hope for fun in the future of filming, being filmed, and watching.

At the exhibition's core lie 3 hand-painted movie posters in the tradition of early 20th century illustrators like Luigi Martinati, swapping off with Wang extending his practice in nuanced and ambivalent portraits of underrepresented Asian actors, and Lascaux filling in the imagined background with overly-painterly attention as one might find in production backgrounds of early Disney films. Drawing and painting in palimpsest over one another's work, each brims with the tension of holding the representation or copy--a villain to intellectual property enthusiasts since the dawn of art criticism--as equally precious to the original work of art.

Throughout the show, the bygone era of Blockbuster is explored through the cold lens of the embittered streamer: laden with the exponentially expanding number of films and television distributed to streaming services each year, and numbed by the dwindling quality from technologies that privilege efficiency over creativity, the average viewer of movies in America today is watching far more content (produced far quicker and rated critically much lower, in all). The desire to pirate and experience the pre-COVID enthusiasm in watching a movie in one's own home have been intentionally phased out by the highly automated and un-unionized streaming services whose writers have been on strike for the better part of 2023. Simply put, the movies just aren't as fun as they used to be, and that's intentional.

With Wang exploring the subjects of our collective memory of pre-streaming cinema, and Lascaux tackling the backgrounds and contexts which inform what we take away from films, the exhibition takes a lighthearted look at the over-produced content generation's nostalgia for the Blockbuster and Bootleg era, thinking through representation of the human subject as one in which we are now, more than ever, always in front of a camera, producing content (whether or not we are aware).

Text by Lindsey Lascaux

**Daniel Wang x Lindsey Lascaux**
*Devon*
36 x 24 inches
2023
Acrylic and Pastel on paper

**Daniel Wang x Lindsey Lascaux**
*Lucy*
36 x 24 inches
2023
Acrylic and Pastel on paper

**Daniel Wang x Lindsey Lascaux**
*Gogo*
36 x 24 inches
2023
Acrylic and Pastel on paper

**Daniel Wang**
*The Agent*
48x 80 inches
2023
Acrylic on Canvas

**Daniel Wang**
*Bruce*
18x 24 inches
2023
Acrylic and Pastel on Paper

**Lindsey Lascaux**
*Your First Cellar Door*
24 x 24x 1.5 inches
Backlit Film on LED Lightbox inside Metal Enclosure
2023

**Lindsey Lascaux**
*The Special*
24 x 24x 1.5 inches
Backlit Film on LED Lightbox inside Metal Enclosure
2023