GENERATIONS

Vagner Mendonça Whitehead (USA/Brazil)

NOMAS* PROJECT

A five-channel video work for public space, Generations, by Vagner Mendonça Whitehead brings together videos made in roughly ten-year intervals, presenting two unintentional similarities (1998 and 2009), one intentional reaction to current times (2018), one reflection of a time past (1973-93), and one speculation of the future (2039). All videos present the same head-and-shoulder figure of the artist, as an antidote to our ever-present talking heads on video screens. Intended to be seen in a public space, Generations is displayed in chronological order (left to right, 1973-2039), although viewers will encounter each video-channel randomly, depending on how they approach them, much like encountering someone at different points in their lives.

About the Artist

Vagner Mendonça Whitehead’s practice encompasses traditional and newer media art-making, curatorial projects and creative writings on visual culture. His artworks display accidental and forced intersections of personal experiences, histories, geo-locations, languages, and found artefacts, and manifest themselves through traditional and new media pieces, presented extensively in group and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums, as well as film and video festivals, nationally and internationally (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Russia, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom). His writings unravel similar media/visual encounters in the form of critical and poetic essays.
Recent art projects have dealt with metaphorical representations and interpretations of flight and flying; his most recent published essay unpacked the “selfie” as a cultural phenomenon for sighting, siting, and citing.

Supported by Texas Woman’s University College of Arts and Sciences