At MEET in Milan the exhibition of John Sanborn, pioneer of media art

From Wednesday, June 5, until Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024, the first Italian exhibition of American artist John Sanborn, entitled Out of order, curated by Maria Grazia Mattei, founder and president of MEET, will be held at the MEET Digital Culture Center-the International Center for Digital Art and Culture in Milan.

“A pioneer in the world of media art, John Sanborn is a hybrid, eclectic artist, who has devoted his career and his entire existence to experimentation, mixing different languages and forms of expression,” Maria Grazia Mattei points out. “Starting from dance and video installations, he naturally landed in the world of digital art, always paying close attention to philosophical and social reflections. MEET, therefore, is the ideal home to host this first solo exhibition of his in Italy, thus proving once again that he knows how to look at contemporaneity and the evolution of our culture.”

The exhibition itinerary, designed by Migliore+Servetto also serving as Creative Advisor, winds through multimedia installations spanning more than four decades of exploration of sound, music, interactive media, video and artworks that address issues of identity - including gender -, cultural truth, memory and mythologies.

Specifically, in MEET’s immersive room, the artist presents V+M, a site-specific work that makes people think about social issues related to queerness, gender fluidity, and misunderstandings that can generate anger, repression, and exclusion. Here Venus and Mars (hence the title V+M precisely, i.e., Venus plus Mars), reinterpreted in a contemporary key, seem to improvise a dance and question visitors on the issue of gender.

Videos visible inside cathode ray tube monitors, which present a timeline of the 1970s and 1980s, are flanked by the works: Body Quartets and Mind Quartets, video installations designed to narrate a state of transformation of our Ego; Out of Chaos, with a random sequence of more than 60 stories explored with augmented reality; and Mythic Status. The latter is “composed” of four portraits - video and sound portraits - of as many characters(Apollo, Atalanta, Nyx and Hercules), each with its own story; four contemporary deities taking their cues from Greek mythology.

A strong and increasingly necessary message, then, expressed in an exhibition of great quality that not by chance opens in the month of Pride, in a neighborhood - that of Porta di Venezia, where MEET is based - in which inclusiveness and diversity are intrinsic characteristics, as well as themes that the International Center for Digital Art and Culture itself has been concerned with since it was founded.

As John Sanborn himself, who will be at MEET on Tuesday, June 18, as a guest speaker at the now well-attended Meet the Media Guru event, points out, “Out of Order provides ’anarchic’ artistic scenarios that activate questions we need to address, welcoming the viewer to participate. Not always to solve our problems, but to confront our condition, understand it and demand that we do something to change, starting with ourselves.”

John Sanborn (Huntington, New York, 1954) is a key member of the second wave of American video artists that includes Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Dara Birnbaum and Tony Oursler. Sanborn’s work ranges from the beginnings of experimental video art in the 1970s to the heyday of the MTV video-music scene and interactive art, to the digital media art of today. His work has “manifested” in television(Alive from Off Center, MTV; Great Performances, PBS), video installations (“V+M,” The Temptation of St. Anthony), video games(Psychic Detective), Internet experiences(Paul is Dead, Dysson) and multimedia art. He is known for collaborations with contemporary virtuoso artists, composers and choreographers. His work mainly deals with the themes of music, mythology and memory.

For all information, you can visit the official website of MEET Digital Culture Center.

Pictured: John Sanborn, The American Quartet

At MEET in Milan the exhibition of John Sanborn, pioneer of media art

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