Christopher Wilcha

After graduating from college in 1993, Christopher Wilcha worked for Columbia House, America’s largest mail-order company for CDs and recorded music. His only qualifications for the job? The ability to tell the difference between Bad Brains and Bad Religion, as well as knowledge of Nirvana, whose song “Nevermind” topped the charts and changed the buying habits of young music fans. “The Target Shoots First” was selected from over two hundred hours of Hi8 footage that Wilcha had collected whilst working for a subsidiary of Sony. “The Target Shoots First” has been screened across the US and internationally, including at the New York Video Festival, the Pacific Film Archive, the Vienna International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Wilcha is currently working on various new video and photography projects that explore how corporations, industry and the military shaped the American landscape in the late 20th century. Last summer, he undertook an artist residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover, Utah Studio. Wilcha completed a BA in Philosophy at New York University and an MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts in 1999.