One Night Stand (Paris)
2006
Single channel video projection
22 minutes 11 seconds, silent
Variable installation
Edition of 3 + 2 AP


The video consists of subtitles against a constant black background. The subtitles are derived from notes that Tan wrote over the course of a trip from New York to Paris, which lasted 24 hours. Drawn to the properties of nighttime in a foreign city for the way it evokes a sense of alienation outside of any social order and elicits transformative states, she devised a “one night stand” – selecting Paris as her first encounter (Mexico City was second, which resulted in her piece Moving a Mountain). With no preconceived itinerary, the only self-issued precept was to roam the city alone past midnight while keeping a notebook. In this image-less piece, Tan relies on how each of us is an individual vessel of image culture. Even if a viewer has had no first-hand experience of Paris, it is invariably part of what Felix Gonzalez-Torres has called “blood memory” – a knowing sense of a place that is a result of the processes involved in inhabiting – not from actual physical presence – but through an experience of multitudinous representations.


Texts

Video transcript of One Night Stand (Paris), 2006
link / pdf


Exhibition History

House Call, Three's Company, New York, 2009

One Night Stand, LAXART, Los Angeles, 2006


Reviews

Archey, Karen. "AFC's Fall Preview: Project Space Edition, Three's Company." Art F City. Sept 2009. Web.
link / pdf

Zellen, Jody. “Lisa Tan: One Night Stand.” Art Papers. March 2007, p. 61. Print.
link / pdf