JJ PEET: THE VACANT AMERICAN

Production | Acquisition Grant

This work was gifted to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive through the support of VIA Art Fund.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) commissioned artist JJ PEET (b. 1973) to produce two new video works, REGULATED VIEWING and FiLTER_ Animation, as the inaugural project for their new public art series On the Hour, curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator. PEET’s videos ran on an hourly basis on an outdoor state-of-the-art LED screen mounted to the façade of the museum’s new Diller Scofidio + Benfro-designed building and on their Theater Two indoor screen. Based in New York, PEET is a multi-talented artist, dexterously working with a wide range of materials, including ceramics, photography, video, and mixed-media installations. For this new commission, entitled THE VACANT AMERICAN, he spent a year traveling through the United States, documenting his discoveries with various kinds of equipment including Super 8 film, SLR animation, and drone cameras, while exploring pressing contemporary issues such as surveillance, the state of the environment, and America’s super-power status.