Sunday, December 6, 2009

Admission:$5-$15 sliding scale, FREE for SoEx members
Location: Artist Television Access (ATA), 992 Valencia Street (at 21st Street)

We are pleased to announce the artists selected for this year's juried film/video screening!

Brian Andrews
Marlene Angeja
Miguel Arzabe
Clark Buckner
Reece Camp Carter
Krista Dragomer and Rashin Fahandej
Jamil Hellu and Darrin Martin
Dana Hemenway
Liz Miller
Doug Williams
Gordon Winiemko
Gaby Wolodarski

Information about the selected films (listed in alphabetical order):

Brian Andrews, Self Portrait in Tears A self-portrait crying tears of light.

Marlene Angeja, Untitled
Untitled is a two-channel mix of found and original footage. Clips used include the following: ballroom dancing, the 2009 presidential inauguration, a volcano, New York City from the top of the Empire State Building, a tree on Pico Island in the Azores, people walking on a carpet, various TV commercials, a landscape shot from a car in 1954, and the sky while driving to work at 7am. I am interested in the relationships formed between these images and sounds.

Miguel Arzabe, John Muir Text Messages
In the summer of 2008 I spent three weeks backpacking a 150 mile stretch of the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada Mountains culminating at the summit of Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states. Dangling from my backpack connected by a carabineer was a handmade chalkboard. Whenever I encountered a particularly sublime vista, I put my pack down, sat silently for a moment, and channeled John Muir’s spirit. He would relay a message to me in text message script and tell me to write it on the chalkboard. The messages were documented both photographically and geospatially. Later, back at home, the photos were uploaded onto Google Earth and the entirety of the trek was reenacted in the virtual world and recorded through screen capture. The source material for the audio comes from a recording of hiking footsteps, voice mail messages, Skype, and phone conversations with distant family and friends, and a video love letter left surreptitiously on my computer.

Clark Buckner, 745 Seventh Ave., New York (Where Vision Gets Built)
745 Seventh Ave., New York (Where Vision Gets Built) presents the former New York City headquarters of Lehman Brothers as a public video installation. The piece explores the roles of video and architecture in the constitution of public space, considers the opposition between nature and civilization, and – especially now, following Lehman Brothers’ demise and the economic crisis to which it contributed – raises the question: Where does vision get built?

Reece Camp Carter, Whale Hunting
Whale Hunting measures relations to unused spaces between buildings within a city

Bougeois B
Bourgeois B is a living time capsule of The Greenbrier resort that once housed the President’s escape bunker.

Hashing
Following symbols throughout the everyday drift of the city, Hashing asks the viewer to participate in a ritualistic experience of following codes and directions throughout the city.

Krista Dragomer and Rashin Fahandej, Sorkh-ab
Shot from below, Sorkh-ab is fixed on a figure engaged in a progression of repetitive acts. It begins with washing, an action that is simultaneously sacred and sensual, and gives way to increasingly primal acts of sucking and spitting. Water acts as a subjective lens, keeping the viewers from direct access to the figure whose face breaks upon waves, coheres, breaks up again, just as the object being washed and eaten seems to change and transform. Abrupt, abstracted vowel sounds punctuate the sound field, contributing to the sense of implied violence. The use of non-mimetic sound further complicates the integrity of the image, shifting it between figure and ground. Significant to the work is the tactile experience – Sorkh-ab invites a looking and listening that is like touching; touching as pressure against the body, a force that surrounds and submerges or moves through the body. It is a touch that yields and resists – resists access, resists the easy equation that seeing equals knowing and that sound tells the truth.

Jamil Hellu and Darrin Martin, Subjects Unknown
In days such as these, is love a human experience or a political statement? Inspired by the ambiguous yet intimate portraits of men together in the history of early photography, this work reflects our concerns regarding the expression of sexuality in relation to rigid conventions about social acceptance and inclusion. As much as the title acts as a veil of denial, we question the precedent of cultural homosexual negation within both historic and contemporary dialogues about family and social identity.

Dana Hemenway, Artificial Rocks: A Multimedia Slideshow 

Artificial Rocks: A Multimedia Slideshow features hundreds of artificial rocks, some sourced from the internet others captured in their native environment, all compiled into an utterly pedestrian and banal slideshow complete with a musical soundtrack by Yanni. The images of the fake rocks become doubly removed from the original source—real rocks, and the viewer must rely on the their perception of authenticity to determine whether or not they are fabricated.

Liz Miller, Spitting Image
Spitting Image is a performance-based video inspired by the delusional condition of a culture whose currency has less value than jewelry from the ninety-nine cent store. A mysterious masked figure expels the by-products of over-consumption.

Doug Williams, Back and Forth
Exploring the simultaneous impulses towards voyeurism and privacy.

Gordon Winiemko, My Secret Love Affair With Matt Gonzalez
Two hairstyles, one hair product. Two men, one metro-sexual love story. Starring artist and sometime activist Gordon Winiemko, and lawyer and sometime politician Matt Gonzalez.

Gaby Wolodarski, Vista
Three women appear on a billboard.