Jeremy Blake

When Sarah Winchester's husband died, she inherited a fortune in profits from the Winchester Repeating Rifle. She spent the second half of her life building a 160-room Victorian mansion, a construction project designed never to end, as she believed that continuing to build would stave off the ghosts of those killed by Winchester guns. Jeremy Blake's Winchester Trilogy uses the huge, tangled structure that resulted, the definitive haunted house, to examine the haunting of American culture by violence. Spirit Hunter documents and analyzes his groundbreaking and critically acclaimed work--some say Blake has invented a new genre, between video and painting, and interest in his progress intersects a number of fields including art, film and fashion. Spirit Hunter also explores such disparate topics as frontier myth, American foreign policy, technology, early film history, psychoanalytic theory and philosophy--all in an accessible narrative style that interweaves art analysis with the story of a mythic haunting that still reverberates today.

Published on the occasion of the U.S. premiere of Jeremy Blake's new Winchester trilogy, this lush and strikingly designed catalogue presents three of the artist's short films: Winchester, 1906 and Century 21--inspired by the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The Winchester mansion was built over the course of nearly 20 years by Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Rifles fortune, who, after the deaths of her daughter and husband, became fascinated with spiritualism and convinced that she was cursed by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester firearms. According to her spiritual advisors, the noise of ongoing construction would help ward off evil ghosts, so she began building what would become a 160-room Victorian, full of bizarre architectural features, which was still unfinished when she died in 1922. Winchester presents a turning point in Blake's work, as the films include not only his well-known digital compositions, but also ink drawings and recognizable footage of the Winchester mansion and its environs. Overlaid, juxtaposed and morphing in and out of one another, these elements combine in an intensely expressionistic and non-narrative manner, evoking Winchester's trouble mind as she tried to rebuild her home. The films call into question traditional cinematic modes of storytelling: cultural mythologies surrounding guns; violence and the American West; and the relationship between physical and simulated reality in the digital age.