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Tony Ouster (born 1957) is a multimedia and installation artist.

He completed a BA in fine arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia,
California in 1979. His art covers a range of mediums working with video, sculpture, installation, performance and painting. Ousters work has
been exhibited in prestigious institutions including the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; Documental VIII, IX, Kassel; Museum of Modern Art, New
York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The D.O.P. Private Foundation, Caracas; the Carnegie
Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Sculptor Projected Munster; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Hirsh horn Museum, Washington, DC; the Tate,
Liverpool. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.
Tony Ouster is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve
elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special effects created by the artist. The early videotapes have been
exhibited extensively in alternative spaces and museums; they are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. His early installation works are
immersive dark-room environments with video, sound, and language mixed with colourful constructed sculptural elements. In these projects,
Ouster experimented with methods of removing the moving image from the video monitor using reflections in water, mirrors, glass and other
devices. For example, "level 7, Level 5", exhibited at the Kitchen NYC 1983, used the translucent quality of video reflected on broken glass.
Ouster began working with small LCD video projectors in 1991 in his installation "The Watching" presented at Documental 9, featuring his first
video doll and dummy. This work utilizes handmade soft cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection. Ouster then
produced a series of installations that combined found objects and video projections. "Judy", 1993, explored the relationship between multiple
personality disorder and mass media. "Get Away II" features a passive/aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress that confronts the
viewer with blunt direct address. These installations led to great popular and critical acclaim.
Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in
the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark
and light in the history of the camera obscure. In his text "Time Stream", Ouster proposed that architecture and moving image installation have
been forever linked by the camera obscure noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Ousters interest in the
ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to large scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.

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