Leslie Thornton

For more than five decades, Leslie Thornton has cultivated an artistic practice anchored in time, working fluidly across film, video and installation. Combining her own camerawork with a range of archival media, Thornton is known for bringing a disparate array of styles, techniques and references into a synchronous whole, exploring themes spanning the anxiety of conflict, the culture of science, and the space between thought and language.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Thornton presents Peggy and Fred in Hell: Folding (1983-2015), the final iteration of her serial work filmed and edited over the course of thirty years. The film follows two children wandering through a strange landscape marked by the detritus of television, popular culture and industrialization, an uncertain place tempered by Thornton’s own Cold War childhood.

Operating as a bridge between late 20th-century anxieties and the contemporary explosion of information technologies, the work turns a critical eye to technology’s potential to outpace human comprehension and control. In the fiction of the film, where Peggy and Fred appear to be raised solely by television, their invented world deteriorates into a disjointed data field, nodding to the ways that language, knowledge and culture are fractured and restructured in a rapidly changing world.

Biography

Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, Tennessee) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions and screenings include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Lightcone, Paris; MoMA, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Tate Modern, London; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg; Malmö Konsthall, Malmö and Secession, Vienna. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Harvard University, Cambridge; Museum of Modern Art, New York; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Thornton trained at MIT (1976) and at Harvard University (1974). She holds an MFA from The Hartford Art School (1976), a BFA from SUNY Buffalo, (1973), and was a mathematics major at Tufts University (1969–1971).