93-’99 Revisited: Music Video Screening #1 with Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Join us as we watch and discuss music videos made between 1993 and 1999, the period from which the Lavendra (Recovery) Archive takes its focus. For the first of three events in this series, E. Jane has invited Brooklyn based artist, photographer, and educator Elliott Jerome Brown, Jr. to be the guest selector.

ASL interpretation will be provided.

In the nineties, the music video as a genre was in flux between an uninspired medium and a site in which to create a significant cinematic oeuvre. In the beginning of the decade, MTV began recognizing the importance of directors’ creative contributions by featuring their credits at the start and end of their works. With a reinvigorated status comparable to motion pictures, the music video became an experimental medium with increasing public access, revealing the technical range of moving images and, through projected fantasies, beguiling viewers with the possibilities for their own lives. The “rewind” is inherent to the experience of music videos, enabling us to watch them repeatedly. Like any good film (which 90’s music video directors certainly considered their works to be), we are rewarded through new readings each time.

Throughout the Session, Artists, Musicians, and Thinkers will be invited to select 15 minutes of their favorite music videos from 1993-1999, sharing memories of their first viewing and how they feel about the videos now. How do these videos hold up in our present moment, and are there things these videos showed us that we are longing for now? Did they plant seeds in bloom in our collective American culture, or Black American culture, specifically?

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (born 1993, Baldwin, New York) is an artist who uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Occasionally the work turns away from standard archival prints to examine photography as a sculptural, redactive, and site-specific process. He has completed residencies at Fire Island Artist Residency and Abrons Art Center in New York, St. Roch Community Church in Louisiana, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He is a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography and received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2019. Brown received his BFA in Photography from New York University and is a Part-Time Lecturer in Photography at The New School in New York. He is represented by Nicelle Beauchene in New York and is based in New York.