LUNA: LESLIE THORNTON Art Exhibit

reporter: Miguel Dominguez

On May 11th the Winkleman Gallery presented the second solo exhibition by New York artist Leslie Thornton. Her video triptych Luna, displayed on three vertical flat screen monitors, featured Brooklyn's version of the Eiffel tower, the parachute jump tower in Luna Park, Coney Island.

Leslie with gallery owner/director Edward Winkleman

Born in Oakridge, Tennessee, Leslie Thornton is considered a pioneer of media aesthetics, one of the first artists to bridge cinema, video, digital media, and installation. Her works have been exhibited all over the planet, at institutions and festivals such as the Whitney Biennial, Documenta, Tate Modern, Seven at Miami Basel Art Fair, Moving Image in New York and in London, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Museum of Modern Art in NYC, Harvard University, and installations/exhibitions at Museum 53, Elisabeth de Brabant Arts Center in Shanghai, China; Zürcher Gallery, New York/Paris; FluxSpace, Philadelphia, IFFR/Museum of Natural History, and solo shows at Winkleman Gallery, NYC, and Elizabeth de Brabant Gallery, Shanghai, China. She has produced installations for capcMusée, Bordeaux in France, Track 16 in Los Angeles, and Cinematexas in Austin.

Thornton has won many awards: she is one of the youngest artists to have received the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Film Institute/Anthology Film Archives; she has also received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Alpert Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; In 2013 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Leslie Thornton is currently Professor in the Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University, and Faculty in Media at the European Graduate School/ Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinare Studien (EGS/EUFIS).

Along with Luna, another work exhibited was The Binocular Series