Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

A pioneering video artist since the 1980s, Pipilotti Rist was recently the subject of an expansive solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor opened in September 2021 and featured installations and works that showcased the breadth of Rist’s interest in everyday, and often intimate, living spaces. In a surreal space dubbed “The Apartment,” Rist transformed furniture and decor into screens for her hypnotic videos and embedded tiny projectors into quotidian objects for delightfully minute—and unexpected—installations.

Made in 2006, Eye Pot can be considered a predecessor of this more recent fusion of video art and readymade, domestic aesthetics. Containing a projector inside of an orange cast iron pot, the work casts a video at an angle onto the wall and floor of its surroundings. This unconventional projection renders the video distorted, and viewers must shift their position and perspective to make out the moving images, which feature disparate scenes including Rist and other performers tossing oranges—one of which ends up inside of a cooking pot. As Emil McAvoy writes, “[Eye Pot] is an inversion of the eye as we know it, a transmitter of light rather than a receiver.”