Summer Video Exhibitions at the University of Akron

While the museum's downtown location was closed for construction, Coming to a Neighborhood Near You offered exhibitions, lectures, concerts, workshops, and other activities at various locations around the region. The exhibit areas, organized by the museum and held in conjunction with partner organizations, was inaugurated in April and May when Christian Marclay: Telephones & Other Things was on view at the University of Akron Myers School of Art Emily Davis Gallery. This exhibition contained one video and two sculptures that spanned 15 years of the artist's career. The video, Telephones, was a 7:30 minute collage of movie clips that explored human interaction with and through the telephone. The two sculptures were on loan from an Akron private collection. Both sculptures deal with the recording of sound. Record Without a Cover, 1985, is exactly what the title suggests; the scratches that it accumulated became, by the artist's design, part of the piece. Bottled Water, 1990, commemorated a sculpture in which Marclay created a "waterfall" of audio tape spilling off a tape recorder. Two more video exhibitions were presented by the Akron Museum of Art at the Myers School of Art in the spring and summer. SeeTV! (May 10-June 4) and SeeTV II (June 7-July 2) explore the development of this young medium in the 1970's and 1980s.