Paul Pfeiffer

The basketball player dunks, and dunks, and dunks again. The boxer punches, and punches, and punches again. Using advanced technology to transform and isolate moments from movies and televised sporting events, Paul Pfeiffer's work examines contemporary notions of racial and sexual identity and how we respond to the human body when it is placed in extreme situations such as ecstasy and pain. Pfeiffer's work also explores issues of time and the increasingly blurry distinction between reality and representation in everyday life. Recent installation pieces transfer mediated, image-based knowledge into physical spaces, with references to movies like The Amityville Horror. This catalog, the first significant publication devoted to Pfeiffer's work, includes full-color reproductions, biographical and bibliographic information, scholarly essays by MCA associate curator Dominic Molon and MIT List director Jane Farver, a discussion between Pfeiffer and renowned conceptual artist John Baldessari, and a text by Pfeiffer himself.