Erika Balsom

Image of Erika Balsom.

Erika Balsom

Type
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department
Film & Media
2010-11

Erika Balsom's research focuses on the intersections between cinema and contemporary art. Ms. Balsom recently completed her doctoral dissertation, "Exhibiting Cinema: The Moving Image in Art After 1990," in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. This study traces the changing contours of what we call “cinema” after digitization through an examination of uses of the moving image and references to film history in recent art. "Exhibiting Cinema" proposes that the shape of this gallery-based cinema may be understood as an interplay of old and new media: cinema emerges as a obsolescent medium compared to digital media, but in relation to traditional media such as painting and sculpture, it supplies a dose of spectacular novelty. This tension between old and new unfolds across four topoi: institutional and curatorial practices, uses of 16mm film aligned with disappearance and loss, the remaking and recycling of the products of film history, and projected image installations engaging hybrid fiction-documentary forms.