Paul Pfeiffer

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1966, but spent most of his childhood in the Philippines. Pfeiffer lived in New York in 1990, where he attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer’s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness. In a series of video works focused on professional sports events Pfeiffer digitally removes the bodies of the players from the games, shifting the viewer’s focus to the spectators, sports equipment, or trophies won. Presented on small LCD screens and often looped, these intimate and idealized video works are meditations on faith, desire, and a contemporary culture obsessed with celebrity. Many of Pfeiffer’s works invite viewers to exercise their imaginations or project their own fears and obsessions onto the art object. Several of Pfeiffer’s sculptures include eerie, computer-generated recreations of props from Hollywood thrillers, such as “Poltergeist,” and miniature dioramas of sets from films that include “The Exorcist” and “The Amityville Horror.”

His distortion of life and focus is an incredible idea. The idea of solely watching the passer-by or the crowd of watching patrons is incredibly intriguing. How does this manipulation create a new focus to which we are made interested in the sideshow? I think his idea is groundbreaking. What if i pushed the idea of the focal point away from the obvious one with the same precision as Paul and was able to trick the viewer into missing the revealing theme of the piece? Ah-hah!