Paul Pfeiffer was born
in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1966, but spent most of his childhood in
the Philippines. Pfeiffer relocated to New York in 1990, where he
attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Pfeiffer’s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography
uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that mass
media plays in shaping consciousness. In a series of video works
focused on professional sports events—including basketball,
boxing, and hockey—Pfeiffer digitally removes the bodies of
the players from the games, shifting the viewer’s focus to
the spectators, sports equipment, or trophies won. Presented on
small LCD screens and often looped, these intimate and idealized
video works are meditations on faith, desire, and a contemporary
culture
obsessed with celebrity. Many of Pfeiffer’s works invite viewers
to exercise their imaginations or project their own fears and obsessions
onto the art object. Several of Pfeiffer’s sculptures include
eerie, computer-generated recreations of props from Hollywood thrillers,
such as “Poltergeist,” and miniature dioramas of sets
from films that include “The Exorcist” and “The Amityville
Horror.” Pfeiffer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships,
most notably becoming the inaugural recipient of The Bucksbaum Award
given by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000). In 2002, Pfeiffer
was an artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. In 2003, a traveling retrospective
of his work was organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
The Project, New York | Carlier | Gebauer, Berlin
Paul Pfeiffer on the Art21 blog |
