Wasn’t it Andy Warhol who remarked that movies make emotions feel real, whereas in daily life they’re a far shore? Pictures seem at least as real to me as my friends, and as someone who makes movies I am (happily) condemned to watch them over and again, I see them more than most of the people in my life.

How can I resent the stories I see in movies? I'm too busy living them.

Whenever I walk into a new building I think: this was just a picture once, a sketch on a draft board. Out of these pictures we are hoping the world into shape.
The proposed exhibition Imitations of Life will present a suite of portraits, an old subject in the world of art,but here each subject is framed as a symptom of motion pictures. Pictures inhabit and occupy the subject,like an invading army, in order to produce it. The virus of motion pictures is what is on display here, there is no originary subject, no personal trauma condemned to hysterical repetition. Instead, each biographical subject is cut or wounded by pictures, and the viewer is asked to reflect on these reflections.

Mike Hoolboom