LOS ANGELES, CA.- Emi Fontana is presenting her third West of Rome project: T. Kelly Mason and Diana Thater's ‘relay’ to be installed in a retail space in Westwood, formerly a bridal shop. This project follows the inaugural West of Rome installation, Meant to be lived in (Today I’m feeling prismatic) by Olafur Eliasson (2005) and Monica Bonvicini’s Not for you (2006).

After the tremendous success of JUMP, shown at the Tate Modern and at the 2006 Whitney Biennale and their first work, the live performance The future that almost wasn’t, ‘relay’ is Mason and Thater’s third collaboration.

Mason and Thater designed a new installation, a theatre comprised of a mirrored room in the Los Angeles Arboretum where a rock band played the song Why Can’t I Touch It, written by Pete Shelley and recorded by the Buzzcocks in 1979. The song is constructed as a round. The same music and verse are played repeatedly, with no actual ending to the song. The lyrics are four simple sentences that are swapped with each new verse.

The song reads: “It looks so real I can see it and it sounds so real I can hear it and it feels so real I can feel it and it tastes so real I can taste it, so why why why can’t I touch it?” to become: “It looks so real I can hear it and it sounds so real I can feel it and it feels so real I can taste it and it tastes so real I can feel it, so why why why can’t I touch it?”

The song and the video shot in the Arboretum are in continuous loops. The visuals are attentively edited to form repetitions and invisible changes. As a work of non-narrative video / installation, ‘relay’ references 1970’s American structuralist (experimental) cinema.

Once installed, the video will be reflected around a mirrored room in order to multiply its already infinite reflections. The viewer will see the video on the screen and also be reflected in the surrounding installation. The actual and the reflected are confused so that both become the real.

T. Kelly Mason lives and works in Los Angeles. Education: B.A. in Music from C.S.U. Long Beach and his MFA from Art Center College of Design. Selected Exhibitions: Daniel Hug Gallery, Galerie Catherine Bastide and the FestSpiele: Munich Opera Festival in Munich, the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Residencies: the Det Fynske Kunstakademie, Denmark, Fulbright residency in the Panama Canal Zone Region and the Gottlieb Foundation.

Diana Thater lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Education: undergraduate degree in Art History from NYU; MFA from Art Center College of Design. Selected Solo Exhibitions: Dia Center for the Arts, The Renaissance Society, the Vienna Secession, the Basel Kunsthalle. In March of 2004 the Siegen Museum for Contemporary Art and the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany opened a simultaneous two-museum survey exhibition of her work from 1993 to 2003. Group Exhibitions: three Whitney Biennials, the Sydney Biennial, the Carnegie International, 1997 Sculpture Projects in Münster.