Summary: Jefferson Pinder sees his art as a form of sampling, mixing, and remixing his own experience and that of others. Drawing on hip hop culture and his interest in African American identity, Pinder is emerging as a video and film artist of great talent. The videos exhibited in "RECOGNIZE!" are Car Wash Meditations, with its references to cleansing living and mechanical bodies; Mule, in which Pinder literally drags the weight of his own struggles; and Invisible Man, a reference to the protagonist in Ralph Ellison's great novel. Each features Pinder dressed in a suit (his "work clothes") and each may be read as a self-portrait. And yet in each work, Pinder also stands aside, allowing the self to project a larger meaning: "I tap into the well of the public subconscious, seeking to find poetry in the everyday-the mundane." See the online exhibition at: http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize . Recorded at Jefferson Pinder's studio, January, 2008. Image info: Invisible Man / Jefferson Pinder, 2004
