Court Square is pleased to present Nature Deficit Disorder, a one-evening presentation of recent video & film work by Jordan Rathus and William Santen that engages the concept of nature dialectically. Through their invocation of the natural world and its imagery, Rathus and Santen are able to open onto a more sustained investigation of human nature and the psyche.
Coined to describe a range of social disorders that arise from our increasing lack of contact with the natural world and the simultaneous lure of the screen and new media, ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ suggests that the way in which we engage with nature today is in itself mediated. Likewise, in the works presented as a part of this program, Rathus and Santen view nature from an urban perspective – reveling in its simplicity and cataloguing our incursions into its idylls.
A related collaborative work by Rathus and Santen, Homo Duplex (2011) will also be screened as a part of this program. In this work, which draws its title from David Foster Wallace’s cult novel Infinite Jest, Rathus and Santen act out Wallace’s character descriptions, inhabiting the personas of a succession of distinct and quirky individuals whose only discernible commonality is their name.
Jordan Rathus received her MFA from Columbia University in Visual Arts in 2012 and her BFA in Film and Television Production from New York University in 2005. Rathus is the recipient of the 2012 Ox-Bow MFA Residency, the 2011 Brooks Fellowship Award from Anderson Ranch, CO and the 2002 Tony Hawkins Award from New York University. She has exhibited films, videos, and works on paper in the United States and Sweden.
William Santen received his MFA from Columbia University (2011) and his BA from the University of Kentucky, Lexington (2009). Santen’s work has been screened at Flux Factory and Nicole Klagsbrun, both New York, and internationally at the Masc Foundation, Vienna, Austria, and Overgaden Museum of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark. His film A Song for You was recently included in the 2012 Queens International at the Queens Museum of Art.
Nature Deficit Disorder is organized by Ceren Erdem, Jaime Schwartz, and Lisa Williams.