Dan Finsel
I Could Be Anybody. I Could Be Somebody.
December 12, 2009 - January 24, 2010

When culture is stripped of content, only artifice remains. For Dan Finsel’s video-cum-installation “I Could Be Anybody. I Could Be Somebody,” artifice is stripped away until we are only left with an actor, a chroma-key green screen, and a manic twenty minutes of Stanislavski’s method acting. In the video Finsel doesn’t act so much as he channels an angst-ridden teen of an Aaron Spelling melodrama that’s been filleted of its plot. Finsel’s character in equal turns caroms through despair and ecstasy. Without the constraints of a storyline he is able to chart new territories where radical emotions erupt full-blown—like Athena from Zeus—without a precipitating event. Behind the viewer is a Flavinesque wall of fluorescent lights, which parallels the reflection in the actor’s spectacles. Noticing this places the viewer into the position of both the camera and uncomfortable voyeur (Parker Jones, Chinatown).

— Michael Buitron