Candice Breitz Lecture

Candice Breitz’s video installations speak to a range of viewers on many different levels.  Using pop culture to both question and relate to the world we interact in, her work has an air of familiarity, yet the message it conveys sometimes does not.  Using pop culture: songs, icons, celebrities, and films, Breitz attempts to speak in a language that is “shared with all urban dwellers.”  Stating that she is interested in the strange relationship between powerful public characters and an audience with no public voice, it is clear where her attraction to speak in terms of popular culture stems from. 

Breitz’s Love Song series, which reduces classics by artists such as Olivia Newton John and Whitney Houston to mere loops repeating all the “I, me, mys” and “Yous” shows her attempt to strip down the superfluous elements of the songs to what really matters: the ability to project yourself into them.  Breitz’s Mother and Father series also deal with a projection of sorts, but in a different manner.  The Mother and Father series are Breitz’s experiment at how far she can take found footage.  Cutting many different yet unorthodox mother and father characters from well known Hollywood films, Breitz shows the audience how the mainstream media is opposed to the traditional family structure, and questions Hollywood’s job as the “new parents” who are raising us.  While Brietz’s work varies from compiling found footage to prove a point, or cutting and editing it to create a new one, it always manages to raise interesting questions about the world we interact in.