Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne produce videos, photographs, installations, and published texts. From 1999 to 2003, their projects centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works focus on the ways in which visions of the future are imagined, claimed and realized, specifically in relation to faith and global politics.
Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Akbank Sanat Gallery (Istanbul), the 2006 California Biennial, Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), and as part of the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program. Video work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among many others.
Julia Meltzer is a media artist and director of Clockshop, a non-profit organization in Los Angeles. For the past fifteen years she has produced documentaries and media art projects on subjects ranging from police abuse in Los Angeles to the bureaucracy of secrecy. For Clockshop, she worked with 12 artists and Viacom Outdoor to develop and produce three seasons of artists' billboards in Los Angeles. She has taught at Hampshire College and UC Irvine. She received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a 2007 recipient of an Art Matters grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria in 2005–6.
David Thorne lives and works in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of a 2007 Art Matters grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. David completed his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. He recently collaborated with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander on the project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War for documenta 12.