To celebrate Foxy Production’s 20th year, we are reinterpreting our inaugural gallery exhibition, Video Store. Comprising programs of video from artists we have worked with over the last two decades, including some from the 2003 exhibition, the 2023 iteration channels the spirit of the original: diverse videos in a wide range on genres, from documentary to abstract animation, will be displayed on twelve screens across the space.

Twenty years ago, the video store was so ubiquitous, so taken for granted, so central to our lives that its function was virtually invisible to us. The 2003 show made the structure of the everyday video store—its promiscuous collection of mainly feature films classified by genre—its curatorial rationale. The video store’s organizing principle could be characterized as both lateral and egalitarian in the extreme, with the money-making block-busters arrayed near the more niche interests of horror, war, and westerns, giving the store’s content the veneer of cultural horizontality. Unlike a group art exhibition that is highly thematized and where works are written via research and interpretation into a grand narrative, one that is ultimately vertical in its features, Video Store’s guiding principle could be described as athematic and radically inclusive, just like the retail stores that inspired it.

Video Store 2023 includes documentation of a bot by Cory Arcangel that automatically likes all Instagram posts by corporate megaliths; a range of Pop-infused CGI videos by Michael Bell-Smith; Rafal Bujnowski’s Video Paintings, where the artist paints over scenes, leaving only solid blackness; Erin Calla Watson’s visual investigations of the poetics of design; a chilling found footage film by Ellen Cantor that was in the 2003 show; Olga Chernysheva’s poetic portraits of everyday life that combine documentary and fiction; Petra Cortright’s iconic performances-to-camera; JODI’s scrambling of Google Earth; Steve Reinke’s fraught, personal video essays; Sterling Ruby’s philosophical abstractions; Travess Smalley’s code-generated, modernist-inspired moving images; and Abbey Williams’ sensual dramas, including YES from the original exhibition.

With many thanks to the all the participating artists. Special thanks to John Cussans; Lia Gangitano, the Estate of Ellen Cantor, and Participant Inc, New York; and Karl McCool and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

Photography: Charles Benton.

• "'Video Store' at Foxy Production." Mousse Magazine. 1 Feb. 2023. Web.
• Izzo, Trevor. “Video Store.” Screenslate. 22 Feb. 2023. Web.
• Press Release and Program Notes