Virginia Kleker | Suicide Note | DVD [2006]

Virginia Kleker is giving you a moment she herself forgot. In an edition of 100 labeled DVDs, the
artist reads a recently discovered, and unused, suicide note aloud to the camera (and therefore you, the viewer) before going over it herself, thereby taking it in as you do, every word, one at a time. This piece asks the receiver to hover in that space between continued, nearly inevitable life and the prospect of a proposed death, and the mundane and heartfelt moments that suspend and propel us along the way. In keeping with Kleker’s interest in bringing people face to face with the idea that some things we imagine to be private are almost never just that, Suicide Note makes a
formidable, if honest, present.

Exhibition Text: Shana Agid

Virginia Kleker is an Oakland-based artist who creates works that combine aspects of video and performance. Her art often uses mimicry or delusion to focus on issues of disjuncture or pretense. Particularly, she explores the dissonance that occurs between corporeal, psychological, and emotional identity. Kleker earned her BFA from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2000 and received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2005. She has shown at the Jack Hanley Gallery and Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and at The Pacific Film Archive, Works/San Jose, and The Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery in the greater Bay Area.

website

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