February 28 - April 12, 2008
This selection of videos and slide-projection works from 1993 to 2006 involve the direct engagement between the artist and the urban environment. Blurring the boundaries between documentary forms, performance, endurance art, and Hollywood fictions, LaBelle’s work ultimately investigates the relationship between our subjective notions of self and the space of the city.
Beginning in the early ‘90s with his videos documenting performative actions to recent works utilizing found video and audio cassettes, LaBelle’s work presents a protean persona in the hot-house of the contemporary metropolis.
There is an element of Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of the “Body without Organs” in LaBelle’s mutating everyman. He is a blank slate in search of agency and identity.
These ideas are made manifest in works such as his year-long “2001: A Space Odyssey” (2001) which both explores the space of the city and skews the relationship of everyday life and art and, more recently, in “Disappearer- Magic Touch” (1999/2007), which features found video footage showing an amateur magician practicing his act at home.
Ultimately, LaBelle’s work suggests that not only our own physicality but identity itself is a by-product of the spaces we occupy and pass through--spaces which are inextricably bound and mediated by technology and the spectacular quality of contemporary culture.
As Gean Moreno has written: “LaBelle’s explorations of the city are never divorced from his continuous inquiry of the body, he roams, collects, swallows, records, drives- and the physical act is always as important as whatever objects result from it. He proposes that one’s surroundings in the poetics of lived experience serve as more than mere setting. His “psychogeography” is an exploration of the body in a very particular space.”
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