Continous Replay reflects Arnie Zane's aesthetic strategies and explores the dynamic interplay between his art and life, photography and dance, his collection of found images and his own photographs, his self-portraits and images of others. Zane observed few boundaries between the many art forms in which he worked -- or between his art and life. The design of the exhibition reflects the dynamic interplay between Zane's photography and dance.

The exhibition is made up of four major components. First are the photographs themselves. They are divided into three major chronological sections:

the early pictorial work taken in Amsterdam, Binghamton, and San Francisco in 1971 through 1974;

the photographs of Pearl Pease taken about 1975;

and Zane's extensive examination Torsos, taken primarily in 1975 and 1976.

The second component uses slide projections and an interactive video installation to present Zane's photographs and his Magic Lantern Slides. The Magic Lantern Slides were frequently used as projection material in his danceworks and allowed the viewer to participate in the process that transformed the gestures frozen by the still camera into the basis of choreographed movement.

The third component provides historical video footage of dances that Zane choreographed and extends our knowledge of the way in which Zane translated still gesture into dance. Video commentary and wall texts about Zane by Bill T. Jones constitutes the fourth component.

Continuous Replay is an attempt not only to make Arnie Zane's photographic work widely available for the first time, but also to position Zane's work in the larger arena of late twentieth-century creative practice in the visual arts and dance, and to associate it with current issues in critical aesthetics, queer theory and identity, and socio-political polemics. As such the exhibition and the catalog are performative gestures themselves. They are a choreography of the many elements of Zane's life; an attempt to provide a sense of the vitality and extraordinary range of Zane's creative endeavors.

Amsterdam, Binghamton, San Francisco

Pearl Pease

Torsos