Bjørn Melhus (German, Norwegian). Still Men Out There. 2003. 6 channel video installation with sound. Museum purchase with funds from DAM Contemporaries in honor of Mimi Ruderman. 2010.459.1-7.

3/5

Modern and Contemporary Art

Modern and Contemporary Art

The work of German-born video artist, Bjørn Melhus, offers a salient critique and reexamination of the relationship between mass media and ideological constructions. Driven by an insatiable interest in the dynamic relationship between various mass media outlets and society, Bjørn Melhus explores these entities' codependence with each other and how they create, entrench, and legitimize American mythologies. Melhus counts film and television as enormous influences in his life. He has been quoted as saying that TV was a mainstay in his life ever since he had the capacity to think. In this installation of television screens and audio clips from iconic American war movies, Bjørn Melhus deconstructs the American myth of warfare and reveals how the media obscures the realities of combat with entertaining fictions. Provocative and humorous, his installation is at once familiar and foreign, as it places the machine-gun blasts, melodramatic dialogue, and swelling musical scores of popular films in an unsettling new context. By replacing the expected images of heroic soldiers with pulsating screens of colored light cued to emotionally-charged sound-bites, Melhus literally illuminates how a culture’s experience of war can be manipulated through the careful arrangement of cinematic clichés.

• "BLINK! Light, Sound and Moving Image"--Denver Art Museum, 3/10/2011 - 4/30/2011.