Conrad Ventur (b. 1977, Seattle) currently lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London in 2008 and has recently had a solo exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2009), among other international solo and group exhibitions. In 2004, Ventur launched the contemporary art magazine USELESS. He was recently selected to participate in Greater New York, the quintennial exhibition organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art to document recent trends, processes and media living and working in the New York area. Using archival footage of cultural icons downloaded primarily from Internet sources such as YouTube, Conrad Ventur creates immersive environments that draw on the power of celebrity, collective memory, and nostalgia. In appropriating these found recordings, Ventur reanimates the great entertainers of past generations, highlighting the desire to recreate and relive significant cultural moments. Moreover, in employing the Internet, a non-hierarchical medium that collapses distinctions and distances in time and space, Ventur points to the merging of past and present in his installations, presenting these notable subjects in a new context.