ANTHONY DISCENZA

Anthony Discenza was born in New Jersey in 1967 and currently resides in Oakland, CA. He received his BA at Wesleyan University in 1990 and his MFA at The California College of Art in 2000. Since the late 1990’s, Mr. Discenza’s work has focused primarily on our relationship to mainstream media. In addition to his personal work, he devotes a great deal of time to HalfLifers, an ongoing collaboration with longtime friend and fellow video artist Torsten Z. Burns. Mr. Discenza’s solo and collaborative work has been shown at numerous national and international venues, including The New York Video Festival, The Pacific Film Archive, The Impakt Festival, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Discenza is currently represented by The Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and the Video Databank of Chicago.

“Discenza's art brings the tradition of painterly abstraction into tension with the infinitely vast storehouse of mass media imagery. Using the recording and delivery mechanisms of digital technology, Discenza creates impressionistic and seductive works that simultaneously suggest the numbing, narcotic effect of the unending stream of moving images coursing through our daily lives.”

- Larry Rinder, Dean, California College of Art, San Francisco, CA

“Anthony Discenza's single-channel work appropriates and redefines the familiar flow of the television transmissions we all know so well. This transformation affects our relationship to these apparently 'innocent' images, investing them with ominous significance. The flickering of lurid comedy shows, pre-packaged and homogenised news programmes, formulaic sports entertainment, are all laid bare as they are destroyed, revealing an underlying sadness and poignancy.

- Abina Manning, Associate Director, Video Databank