James Fotopoulos

" With Fotopoulos we are frequently plunged straight into an indefinable consciousness that remains completely foreign to us, yet unsettlingly intimate. " Maximilian Le Cain

James Fotopoulos is an artist working primarily with the mediums of moving image, sculpture, and drawing. Among his many notable film and video works, which range from several seconds to over seven hours are Zero (1997), his first feature which debuted when Fotopoulos was just 20, Migrating Forms (1999), Christabel (2001), Jerusalem (2003-2004), The Sky Song (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dignity (2012), and There (2014). His works have screened and exhibited in the US and abroad including at MoMA P.S.1, Walker Art Center, Whitney Biennial, Mu- seum of Modern Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Andy Warhol Museum, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Festival del Film Locarno, Museo de Art Contemportaneo del Zulia, Vene- zuela, Biennial for Videoart, Mechelen, Belgium, among others. His work has been discussed in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, The New York Post, and others. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant. James Fotopoulos was born in Chicago, IL in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York.

" ‘The films of James Fotopoulos examine heady esthetic and existential concerns through a unique hybrid of contemplative, delicate avant-garde formal effects and brutal low-budget body-horror, set within meticulously plotted structures that eschew typical experimental serendipity in favor of calculated auteurist rigor. At age 24, he’s completed 12 shorts and two features that play like the unlikely progeny of Stan Brakhage and Richard Kern, set in dingy urban environments that would make Ed Ulmer proud. Obsessed with the philosophical problems regarding sex, violence, extreme psychic states and unnerving atmospheres, as well as the classic formal issues of 16 mm lensing, Fotopoulos’ films wed a youthful fixation with the overpowering nature of primal drives to an uncommonly mature certitude of vision and technique." 

" Just as Brakhage’s camera-vision evolved in the age of cinephilia, Fotopoulos’s digital drones and hypnotic pixels parallel our own daily immersion in computery realms." 

Ed Halter