Tony Oursler

Tony Oursler (born 1957) is an American multimedia and installation artist married to Jacqueline Humphries.

Born in Manhattan in 1957, Oursler was brought up in a connected and well-to-do family that settled in Nyack, New York.

He is the son of former Reader's Digest Editor-in-Chief Fulton Oursler, Jr. and Noel Nevill Oursler.

His grandfather was the writer Fulton Oursler.

At CalArts, his fellow students included Mike Kelley, Sue Williams, Stephen Prina, and Jim Shaw.

John Baldessari — with whom he did an independent study — and Laurie Anderson were his teachers.

He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California in 1979.

His art covers a range of mediums, working with video, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting.

The artist currently lives and works in New York City.

Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade videotapes, including The Loner (1980) and EVOL (1984).

Billy Rubin describes EVOL as "(charting) the territory between our passion-charged personal narratives and the near impossibility of representing that desire visually or linguistically, the end result often being nothing more than banal cultural cliches."

These works involve elaborate soundtracks, painted sets, stop-action animation, and optical special effects created by the artist.

The early videotapes have been exhibited extensively in alternative spaces and museums.

They are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.

Oursler's early installation works are immersive dark-room environments with video, sound, and language mixed with colorful constructed sculptural elements.

In these projects, Oursler experimented with methods of removing the moving image from the video monitor using reflections in water, mirrors, glass, and other devices.

Oursler moved back to New York in 1981 and was picked up by Electronic Arts Intermix.

The early installation Son of Oil, presented at MoMA PS1 in 1982, links the dystopian feelings brought about by conspiracy theories with the perturbing politics of the oil industry.

The large-scale installation L7-L5 deals with science fiction as entertainment in contradiction to the terror of first-hand accounts of alien encounters.

It was presented at The Kitchen (New York) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) in 1984.

Spillchamber (1987) and Spillchamber 2 (1989) were displayed in New York and Japan.

Oursler began working with small LCD video projectors in 1991 in his installation The Watching presented at documenta 9, featuring his first video doll and dummy.

This work utilizes handmade soft cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection.

Oursler then produced a series of installations that combined found objects and video projections.

Judy (1993) explored the relationship between multiple personality disorder and mass media.

Get Away II features a passive/aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress that confronts the viewer with blunt, direct address.

These installations led to great popular and critical acclaim.

Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999).

In 1999, Oursler moved to a studio near New York City Hall.

An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura.

In his text "Time Stream," Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peepholes.

The essay both presents a timeline of mimetic technology and serves as an archive of some of Oursler's influences.

Oursler's interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image led to large-scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.

The Public Art Fund and Artangel commissioned the Influence Machine in 2000.

This installation marks the artist's first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead.

Oursler used smoke, trees, and buildings as projection screens in Madison Square Park, NYC and Soho Square, London.

He then completed several permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, and Arizona, including "Braincast" at the Seattle Public Library.

Million Colors (2006) was commissioned by the state of Arizona for permanent display at the Phoenix Convention Center in downtown Phoenix, AZ.

While researching this project, Oursler discovered that locals boast that the canyons and desert are graded in more than a million different colors.

Aurora sightings and surrounding mountains evoke the lawless and anarchic past of American culture: abandoned goldmines and violent desperadoes of the Wild West.