(b. 1957 NYC) Artist Tony Oursler's brand of low-tech, expressionistic video theater is singular in contemporary art. Willfully primitive, often grotesque, and crafted with an ingenious visual shorthand, his psychodramatic landscapes of image and text are fabricated within the ironic vernacular of pop culture. Oursler has worked in installation, painting, sculpture, and video since the mid-1970s. His recent mixed media installations, in which theatrical objects such as puppets and dolls are layered with video projections and spoken text, are prefigured in the wildly inventive body of videotapes that he has produced over the past twenty years. In his videotapes, Oursler's idiosyncratic fictions take the form of bizarre narrative odysseys, horror-comedies that evoke Caligari by way of Eraserhead. Subjective visions of cultural and psychosexual delirium are pursued with outrageous black humor and a surreal theatricality