Video Art PGH 

Video Art PGH is an opportunity for Pittsburgh area filmmakers and artists working in video. Our first edition is juried by artist Cameron Granger (Columbus, OH) and will be on view at the Miller ICA during the Transcendental Arrangements: 109th Annual AAP Exhibition [July 29–Sept. 3, 2023] as well as featured in our online gallery. Submissions were open to artists of any experience level who live within a 150-mile radius of Pittsburgh.

Juror's statement

We find ourselves inundated with images. Every tap, swipe, scroll, snap; tagged and tracked. Our bodies become data points, data doubles rendered via check-marked boxes. Anything that does not fit neatly within is either disappeared or barred from entry entirely. So, here we are: trapped, as Ruha Benjamin says, “between regimes of hypervisibility & invisibility”. If Foucault teaches us that “visibility is a trap”, can a strategic oscillation between the two—visibility and invisibility—help us map our way up out of this? 

Each selected work on view pushes us to interrogate our relationship with the visible and obfuscated world around us. Hidden power structures, redacted histories & gazes that enclose haunt each film. Rather than solely being content with showing us how things are, the filmmakers have created new images that encourage us to look deeper so that we may, as Ms. Toni Morrison said “carve away at the accretions of deceit, ignorance, and sheer malevolence” embedded in the images & language of the powerful, so that new ways of imaging, and thus new futures are “not only available but inevitable”—new imaginings that conspire towards a future wholly our own.