I Morti

On Friday, September 13 the Cincinnati Arts Association's Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts premiered three exhibitions to launch its eighth season: I Morti, a contemplative five-channel video installation by Cincinnati video artist, Charles Woodman; Desire, Tunnel & Wheelchair, a new series of provocative video installations by Gagik Aroutiunian (Chicago, IL); and Beauty and the Beholder, a group exhibition of Cincinnati artists curated by Emily Buddendeck, director of the alternative exhibition and performance venue SSNOVA, that examines the tantalizing subject of voyeurism.

More than four years in the making and filmed in dozens of locations, I Morti is a suite of overlapping sounds and images creatively conceived by Charles Woodman which immerses the viewer in a room of five continually shifting projected images that evoke a shared remembrance of a past never known. Blending images of the dead with footage from their imaginary diaries and from the real life of the artist, Woodman creates a complex meditation on mortality, history, and the nature of existence, exploring the difference between "lived" and "represented" experience. By turns beautiful, prosaic, poetic and banal, I Morti presents a portrait of a life imagined and experienced, in a dense flowing mosaic of images.

Charles Woodman has served as assistant professor of electronic art at the University of Cincinnati since 1999. He has been creating multi-channel video installations presented in a variety of venues nationally since 1989. Previous installations of his work have been included in exhibitions at Art Resource Transfer Gallery, NY.; Artist Television Access, San Francisco, CA; Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM; Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Neighborhood Film Project, Philadelphia, PA; Arlington Art Center, Arlington, VA; 911 Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA; Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Living Arts of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK.