RICHMOND ARTS CENTER
Richmond, California
The TV Times, The world through the box.

Television - as entertainer, educator, advertiser and edifier - influences our thoughts, feelings and perceptions. It was in San Francisco on September 7, 1927, that inventor Philo T. Farnsworth created the cathode ray tube apparatus upon which modern television is based. Today, Bay Area companies lead in the development of new technologies based on televison, notably interactive TV and virtual reality.

Artists contribute to the cultural dialogue about television with works of art which are both stimulating and thought-provoking. These artworks express familiar themes; the horrors of war brought nightly ino our living rooms from Vietnam and Iraq; the temptations of a consumer society bursting into our viewing for brief seconds hawking convertibles, soap suds or sneakers with eye-catching alacrity and verve; the replacement of human contact by television, in a society gripped by the problems of divorce, ethnic warfare, latch-key youth and interned aged. These works capture something of the excitement, the power and the disillusionment of television's promise.

The exhibition celebrates with nostalgia that which it so familiar and provokes with new perspectives that which is so strange about this familiar object. TV Times:The World Through the Box provides commentary on the medium and the messages which have molded our lives. I invite you to reflect on that box in the corner that we take for granted every day.

Donna Reid
May 11, 1993