In the post-Labor Day crush of gallery openings, there’s one that personal media-heads will not want to miss.

On Tuesday the 12th, Lucas Samaras: iMovies premieres at the PaceWildenstein gallery (534 West 25th Street in Chelsea).

The 69-year-old Greek-born Samaras has been involved with portraiture for decades; for his 1979-1981 Sittings series, he invited friends and acquaintances to his studio, where he cajoled them into stripping nude and striking poses for a large-format Polaroid camera. Since the dawn of the century, Samaras has gone digital, and in his exhibition at PaceWildenstein, the tables have turned. The Sittings photos showed a clothed Samaras looking on at the antics of his unclothed friends. The current work is a 25-channel video installation; the focal point is a five-minute iMovie called Ecdysiast, in which Samaras himself removes his clothes and mugs for the camera’s distorting lens. The 24 other videos in the installation show footage of Samaras’s friends and acquaintances — including famous art-world figures like Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, and Claes Oldenburg — as they watch Ecdysiast.

Five other video works in the show are each made up of between four and six short films apiece. Many of these flms were shot in Samaras’s 62nd-floor Midtown apartment, and offer takes on slices of ordinary life.

I want to see this show for several reasons. First, because although Samaras doesn’t enjoy the wide name-recognition of Close, Johns, or Oldenburg, he’s been influential in certain art circles for decades. Second, he’s made particularly deep footprints in self-portraiture; the New York Times points out that he was photographing himself in various costumes and identities long before Cindy Sherman achieved fame for her similar approach. Thirdly, I’m beyond intrigued by the assertion that Samaras used the “Bump” filter on iMovie to distort the image of himself in the Ecdysiast movie. Is this the same filter that everyone I know is obsessed with using to take funhouse-mirror pictures of themselves with the built-in “Photo Booth” feature on their MacBooks? If so, I’ll be tickled to the core to see how this dorky popular fad translates to a high-art setting.

Lucas Samaras: iMovies runs through October 7.