CINEMA-SCOPE: "TOMMORROW WAS THE DAY BEFORE" @ THE SCOPE-LONDON ART FAIR, OCTOBER 21-24, 2005
Curated by Lee Wells (IFAC) < http://www.leewells.org/scopelondon/cinemascope-pr.htm >

"Tomorrow Was the Day Before" shows how contemporary artists are responding to the turbulent beginning of a new era.
These timely artists show a strangely prophetic view of our ever-shrinking world, juxtaposing mundane, everyday existence
with a direct political commentary of contemporary life.
 
Curated Artists: Bani Abidi (Pakistan), Hackworth Ashley (US), Janet Biggs (US), Olga Chernysheva (Russia), Calin Dan (Romania), Raul Vincent Enriquez (US), Victor Escobar (Columbia), Davey Force (US), Tim Hailey (US), Dorrie Halliday (UK), Petra Lindholm (Sweden), Van Mc Elwee (US), Mac McKean (US), Motomichi Nakamura (Japan), Ned and Shiva Productions (US), Marisa S. Olson (US), Robert Petrick (US), Jean Poole (Australia), Zev Robinson (UK), Marco Roso (US), Amparo Sard (Spain), Annie Schap (US), Jennifer Schmidt (US), Stefanie Schneider (Germany), Raphaele Shirley (US), Nico Smith (US), Gaynor Sweeney (UK), Michael Szpakowski (UK), Lenara Verle (Brazil), Ana De Vicente (Costa Rica), Alison Ward (US), Marten Winters (Netherlands), Scott Wolniak (US)
 
Curatorial Advisors: Rebecca Canon (Australia), Agricola de Cologne (DE), Rodney Dickson (US), Timo Mank (Netherlands), Ed Marszewski (US), Trong Nquyen (US), Christiane Paul (US), Laure Prouvost (UK), Juan Puentes (US), Miroslaw Rogala (US), M.J. Salema (Portugal), Melissa Schubeck (US) 

Participating Galleries and Project Spaces: Galerie Caprice Horn (Berlin), Conner Contemporary (Washington DC), JJ Heckenhauer (Berlin), OHG Gallery (Berlin), IFAC (Brooklyn), Joymore (Brooklyn), Light Contemporary (London), Mirza|Raza (Fontainebleau), Red Dot Gallery (Miami), Galerie Parisud (Cachan), Galerie Trabant (Kitzbuel), White Box (NY) 

CONVERSATIONAL LAG @ VOLUME GALLERY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Reception: Thursday March 17, 6-8 PM, March 8 - April 16, 2004
http://www.volumegallery.com

Featuring: Hilary Baldwin, Bill Davenport, Dana Frankfort, Peter Gallo, Jean Lowe, Martin McMurray, Jennifer Schmidt,
Alison E. Taylor and Brad Tucker.

Nick Lawrence | Owner / Director
C. Sean Horton | Director

LETTERS IN A COMA @ JEN BEKMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Contact: jen bekman | 6 Spring Street New York, NY 10012 |
212.219.0166 | http://www.jenbekman.com

Jennifer Schmidt: Letters in a Coma
One Night Only Screening, November 13, 2004. 9-11 p.m.
New York, NY - jen bekman and guest curator Jeffrey Teuton are pleased to present a one-night-only
debut screening of Jennifer Schmidt's recent video animation, Letters in a Coma.

Selected to be the first video screened at the gallery, Letters in a Coma is comprised of layers of hundreds of solitary games of Tic Tac Toe, animated together to form the core of the piece. As this solitary game is played over and over, two folk style birds are fixed, unmoving observers. Their stoicism augments the haunting loneliness of the video. Visual references to children's games and sampler stitch are startlingly modern in a bold color palette drawn from the most basic elements of color printing. The soundtrack by l. contra includes a manufactured heartbeat that drifts in and out from the distance, lingering and fading in a lucid state of dream, frustration, anger, and reality.

LETTERS IN A COMA, FREE TRANSLATION, & JUST KEEP DRAWING @ ARTISTS FOUNDATION, BOSTON, MA
Big Red and Shiny, Issue #15 > PDF Download- Review of Letters in a Coma
by Jessica Poser

The Artists Foundation in the South End presents three solo shows, a sculpture installation by Phyllis Ewen, a collection of drawings by Ria Brodell, and a video by Jennifer Schmidt. It’s a lot of work packed into a small space, and the artists are notably diverse in style and medium. By far the most compelling work of the three is Jennifer Schmidt’s videopiece, . Effectively exploring the phenomenon of 'the uncanny', the piece speaks to what Freud characterized as the aesthetics of anxiety: “It is when [Freud] starts to pursue the idea of ‘repetition’…It is cited as one of a number of cases where an ‘unintentional return’ may produce ‘the same feeling of helplessness, the same sense of the uncanny’, such as being lost in a wood but returning to a familiar spot, or ‘groping around in the dark in an unfamiliar room’ and colliding with ‘the same piece of furniture’. Freud postpones discussion of ‘how the uncanny element in the recurrence of the same things can be derived from infantile psychology’, saying that he treats it elsewhere as part of the ‘compulsion to repeat’ that dom- inates the unconscious mind’. After Freud, repetition will never be the same.” (Haughton 2003) Literally en-trancing, Letters in a Coma sits hypnotically somewhere in between painting, video and digital needlepoint. The video has several layers. On the very surface is a blue stencil that frames the background. The stencil features two birds facing each other and recalls a design remembered from childhood giving it a distinctly nostalgic flavour.Within and behind this frame, is a changing background consisting of a kind of pixilated grayscale plaid that fades in and out of perceptibility and provides the grid for appearing and disappearing tic tac toe games repeatedly played in bright colors. The red diagonal lines that appear resemble scars or cuts as they bleed through the screen. The sound is integral to the piece, on which Schmidt collaborated with Colin Asquith (Contra). Apparently a mix of acoustic and electronic elements, the result is an eerie soundscape through which a heartbeat (or hospital monitor) occasionally emerges. The weaving of image and sound here builds us up to a climax that never comes, giving the piece a time-lapse quality. The xoxo’s of the tic tac toe games also remind us that the piece is also made of zero’s and one’s; the game playing, the persistence of the grid and the notion that the image is generated through a repeated activity gives the impression that Schmidt has somehow stitched a video together through a needlepoint sampler. In many ways, the piece explores the uncanny- that which is both familiar and strange, the anxieties of memory, and the futility of communication.