FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kristi Engle Gallery
5002 York Ave.
Highland Park, CA 90042
323.472.6237
kristi@kristienglegallery.com

Kristi Engle Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of video work by Bettina Hoffmann. Using cinematic conventions, particularly traditional ideas of mise-en-scène, Hoffmann exposes the underlying tension in seemingly ordinary settings. Her work is captured and manipulated with a revolving camera that swings around a contrived set where motionless living models sit in domestic scenes. The camera moves rather than the people, circling a room multiple times at very slow pace, disconcerting a viewer's sense of motion & time.

As the camera revolves around the stationary figures, the viewer sees a specific situation - a scene at the family breakfast table, a conversation between two friends - from every angle. Hoffmann directs and constrains our gaze even while it offers up all 360 degrees, magnifying a moment of tension in a narrative flow through specific direction and repetition.

Bettina's scenes are that moment between one person's comment and the other person's response. After a confrontation but before the questioned can react. A dispassionate camera intensifies one's vague curiosity. Hoffmann's work is a n unresolved voyeuristic experience that creates obvious rather than latent tension. With every sweep of the room, one's eye looks for clues from the benign objects in the room, trying to speculate from things that we can physically see, about a situation we can know nothing about.

Bettina Hoffmann lives and works in Montreal, Canada. She has previously exhibited in Montreal, Toronto Berlin, Düsseldorf and various other cities in Europe and Canada.

Kristi Engle Gallery devotes itself primarily to solo exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists. It is located in Highland Park, near the corner of Ave. 50 and York Blvd.