NEW YORK, NY.- Times Square Arts breaks out of Times Square’s electronic billboards with artist Pipilotti Rist’s Open my Glade (Flatten), 2000-2017, from 11:57 p.m. to midnight every night in January. This project is a part of Midnight Moment, a monthly presentation by the Times Square Advertising Coalition and Times Square Arts, and is presented in partnership with the record-breaking survey exhibition Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, on view at the New Museum through January 15.

Pioneering video artist Pipilotti Rist re-confronts the screens of Times Square in a new multichannel edition of a work originally commissioned by the Public Art Fund in 2000. Originally appearing on a single screen in Times Square, Rist now surrounds the plazas on multiple screens in vivid color, flattening her face against glass as if to break through the screens and into Times Square. Her features humorously distorted, her makeup smeared, Rist transgresses expectations for women in media while also questioning the invisible boundaries placed on women and their history, experiences, pains and wishes in ways that resonate just as much in 2017 as they did in 2000.

Pipilotti Rist, Artist, said, "In my work Open my Glade (Flatten), the human being wants to transgress any screen and jump out onto the square. She wants to jump out of her skin and melt with you.”

Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, New Museum, said, “You can never get enough of Pipilotti Rist, so it's a thrill to see her work on sixty-two screens as part of Midnight Moment. Throughout her career, Rist has reinvented the ways in which technology and media frame and represent bodies—particularly those of women, so I can’t imagine a better context than Times Square to literally multiply her powers.”

Tim Tompkins, President of the Times Square Alliance, said, “At a time when the larger political currents are making many women feel both the glass ceiling and the walls closing in on their bodies, this work resonates more than ever.”

Sherry Dobbin, Times Square Arts Director, said, “Rist is a master of immersive video that challenges the normally passive audience position; she disrupts the containment of a frame and creates a sense of force that draws the viewer inside the work.”

Fred Rosenberg, President of the Times Square Advertising Coalition, said, “The Midnight Moment program is a creative way for our signs to reflect what’s going on in New York City at any given time. Naturally, we are thrilled to collaborate with this pioneering digital media artist and her successful retrospective at the downtown New Museum.”