Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager are a Brooklyn-based[1] artist team who make video installations for exhibition in gallery and museum spaces as well as in conventional cinematic ones.
[2] Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager began to work together formally in 2006 when invited to the Montalvo Arts Center in Northern California as part of the Lucas Artists Residency Program, where they conceived their first collaboration, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2008).
Using a formal device of ventriloquism, which appears in Moskowitz and Trager's other collaborative work, dialogue is dubbed and sung by a "digitally layered 'multi-voice,'" in which "the artists' voices, mixed occasionally with others are collapsed in a single harmony.
[3] In 2008, Cloud Cuckoo Land was the recipient of three grants: a Fellowship in Video from the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA), a Finishing Funds Award from the Experimental Television Center and a Cuts and Burns Artist Residency from The Outpost.
Two Russians in the Free World - IFFR.COM - International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 - IFFR The work was made with the support of a residency granted to the artists at Headlands Center for the Arts in Northern California in late 2011.
In 2014, the project received a Finishing Funds Award from The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes / NYSCA for its presentation as an installation at Participant Inc, a non-profit gallery on New York's Lower East Side.
[16] In 2013, the Centre Pompidou’s Hors Pistes film festival featured Cloud Cuckoo Land, The Story of Elfranko Wessel, Two Russians in the Free World, and A Bit of Dirt in a retrospective screening.