Daniel Reeves is Landen Professional in Residence Internationally acclaimed video and installation artist Daniel Reeves '76 will be on the Ithaca College campus October 6-10 as the inaugural Skip Landen Professional in Residence. Activities planned for the week include a retrospective of his films, a series of master classes, and exhibitions of some of his works. Named for Landen, the former faculty member who chaired the College's Department of Cinema and Photography for more than 15 years, the residency will coincide with Reeves's October 4-5 participation in the prestigious Robert Flaherty film seminar as well as the October 7 opening of his exhibit, Eingang (The Way In), at the Handwerker Gallery. "I am a slave to virtuosity," says Reeves. "It seems that the best ideas tend to arrive unannounced like unexpected guests, creeping in at dawn or in that liminal zone at the threshold of sleep. The gravitational pull in all of my work is the so-called great matter . . . that is the matter of life and death. It is as if something had left a constantly recurring wake up call from the war going off in my chest." Indeed, it was his survival of an ambush in Vietnam some 30 years ago that raised his artistic consciousness. His Emmy Award-winning video Smothering Dreams (1981) was an anguished recreation of his war experience, and it remains one of his most talked-about works today. Reeves's works are included in numerous international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. His most recent video work, Obsessive Becoming (1995), a visionary meditation on the secrets of family history and the psychic legacy of our troubled century, has won many awards, including the second prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Reeves began working on the development of "video poetics," exploring personal, political, and metaphysical themes, in 1982, and one of these works, Sabda (1985), won a blue ribbon at the American Film Festival. "From impassioned indictments of America's culture of violence to soulful lamentations of spiritual loss, Daniel Reeves's body of work constitutes one of the most important elaborations of video poetics in the field," notes Electronic Arts Intermix. Since 1988 he has been concentrating on sculpture and video installations. His sculpture Eingang premiered at the High Museum in Atlanta in 1990 and was selected for inclusion in the Tate Gallery's New North touring exhibit the same year. His most ambitious project, The Wall of Patience (1988), was first installed at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco and received enthusiastic reviews from local and international critics when it was reinstalled during Glasgow's City of Culture year. Reeves has been a Guggenheim fellow in video art. In 1995 he was awarded the Rockefeller Inter-Cultural Fellowship in Video, and he has received four fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, including the U.S.-Japan fellowship in 1991. His videotapes have been broadcast widely and exhibited internationally at festivals and institutions including the Tokyo Video Festival, Japan; San Sebastian Video Festival, Spain; American Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; Edinburgh International Film Festival, Scotland; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial, New York; Musee du Louvre, Paris; and the Tate Gallery, London. He is currently at work on his first feature-length narrative, entitled Perdu, as well as designing a new series of media sculpture projects, including a peace memorial on what was once called the "demilitarized zone" in Vietnam. Born in Washington D.C., Reeves lives in Scotland with his wife, Linda, and daughter, Adele. Major support for the Landen residency is provided by the James B. Pendleton Endowment in the Roy H. Park School of Communications. On the strength of a $16.5 million bequest from Pendleton -- the largest single gift in the College's history -- the endowment is used to endow professorships and scholarships, as well as provide general support for cinema and photography and other programs at the School of Communications.

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