Michael Mersereau

Doppleganger

Doppleganger includes selected works by media artist Michael Mersereau. The exhibition features time-based artworks exploring the boundaries of cinema, television, and performance to create absurd and uncanny worlds. His experimental videos layer socio-historical symbols and religious iconography to create psychological spaces that examine their power relationship to cinema.

“I consider my work, whether video, sound, installation, music or any medium, as a conversation with the language of cinema. For me, film/cinema is more than just material but a way of thinking applied to a person's observations or experiences.”
— Michael Mersereau

Michael Mersereau is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California, and Montréal, Canada. He uses the boundaries of cinema and television genres, such as horror, suspense, and soap operas, to create experimental sound, video, performance, and installation. Mersereau has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries including Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, The Diego Rivera Anahuacali Museum, Eastern Bloc, Wassaic Project, Artists' Television Access, and Maison de la Culture Claude-Léveillée. His videos have been screened at the Lausanne Underground Film Festival, Toronto Underground Film Festival, Traverse Video Festival, and ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum. As a composer and experimental musician, his collaborations premiered at the Activation Series of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, The Lab with Jeanie Aprille Tang, Galerie B312 in Montréal for Thomas Begin, Mills College Art Museum with choreographer and dancer Molissa Fenley, and Maison de la Culture Claude Léveillée.

Featured

Opacity

2021, digitally edited video

Opacity explores semi-biographical events blended with an atmospheric narrative in otherworldly landscapes. The short video honors the cryptic and restrained, using obscure symbolism, narrative distance, and an unresolved journey into a hallucinogenic netherworld.

The Guest

2022, digitally edited video

The Guest combines scenes from Douglas Sirk’s “All that Heaven Allows” with Super 8 footage and images created with machine learning.

Featured

The Avenging Angel

2022, digitally edited video

The Avenging Angel combines footage shot and compiled in Super 8 with footage found through machine learning. The abstract atmospheric narrative, steeped in obscure decadent ritual, suggests a shadow world of ignored labor just below a glass pane at a picnic.

Artist’s Statement About the Work

I consider my work, whether video, sound, installation, music or any medium, as a conversation with the language of cinema. For me, film/cinema is more than just material but a way of thinking applied to a person's observations or experiences. I like to fully commit to the fetishization of cinematic aesthetics to combine a feeling of seance and social commentary, meanings that reveal themselves in the gap between process and viewing. My works obsessively map socio-historical symbols, religious iconography, psychological spaces, and their power relationship to cinema.
— Michael Mersereau