From Old Masters to the Cartoonish
Lance Esplund
New York video artist Tony Oursler (b. 1957) is the David Lynch or Tim Burton of the art world—the quirky, eerie showman dazzling (and sometimes annoying) audiences with a mixture of the amusing and macabre. One of his favorite subjects is parts of the human body, particularly the eye, disembodied and projected on walls, trees or objects at enormous scale. His collaged installations, comprising moving images, sounds, text and the spoken word, can be as abrasive as "Eraserhead" and as entertaining as Saturday morning cartoons.
In Mr. Oursler's current show of eight new minuscule works—timed with his "Valley" (the inaugural online exhibition of the Adobe Museum of Digital Media at www.adobemuseum.com)—the artist continues to explore the nature of the disturbing and uncanny. His installations are still juvenile and cliché-driven—occasionally trying. But by creating performance-art vignettes—sometimes projected at nearly pinhead-scale—on tiny stages, sculptures and boxes, Mr. Oursler, in his best work yet, has transformed his vision into miniature cabinets of curiosities and turned spectacle on its head.