Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz (South Africa/Germany, b. 1972) Diorama (Miami Version), 2002

Nine-channel video installation and furniture (color, sound) Gift of William and Ruth True, originally commissioned by Artpace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio, 2012.8

Candice Breitz is a South African artist primarily working in video and photography. Known for her multi-channel video installations in which she excerpts found footage drawn from mass media and popular culture, Breitz’s work investigates the way these exterior influences shape our understandings of self. In Diorama (Miami Version), looping clips of key characters from the American soap opera Dallas—which aired for fourteen seasons between 1978 and 1991—play simultaneously across nine television monitors scattered throughout a fictive domestic space. To create this work, Breitz clipped phrases from Dallas that speak to themes of family, love, obligation, indiscretion, infidelity, and betrayal— all characteristic of the genre. Rapidly repeated and overlapped in the space, they create a mesmerizing cacophony that exaggerates the ordinary viewing experience. Breitz restages these clips in a space that recalls the aspirational interiors in which viewers, enamored with the lives of the ultra-wealthy Texas oil tycoons Dallas portrayed, might have watched the show when it aired.