Humor

Vault of Vapors

One of my weather diary series out in Oklahoma. The tone is wistful, the surroundings wispy (with some puffs of pungency). The TV is on and the porcelain is smeared with some residue atrocity from a previous passion. But all is well as emptiness persists beyond the four walls of this prairie mausoleum.

Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1

Though the use of fairytales and dark fantasies, these works combine the commonplace with the macabre to construct a new world of the subconscious.

(tell me why): The Epistemology of Disco

(tell me why): The Epistemology of Disco is an often humorous, at times sarcastic and poignant look at the role that disco music has played in the formation of gay male identity. The piece challenges the notion of disco as merely a "leisure activity" by positing disco as an important cultural space created as an expression of gay sexuality.

-- Vtape

This title is only available on CHANNELING: an invocation of spectral bodies and queer spirits

A Short Lesson

One minute, two mysteries: The shelf-life of genius and why we try to make pictures when, as Robert Lowell put it, "No voice outsings the serpent's flawed, euphoric hiss.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3.

A Perfect Pair

A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies. Export demonstrates how the body of the consumer, especially that of the female consumer, is co-opted by commercialism. In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects, as a body builder seduces a prostitute at a bar saying, “Your eyes are the most beautiful blue ad-space. Your cheek could promote a Mercedes.

A la Manera de W. Disney

Colorful lines follow the gestures of a conductor leading the orchestra until he disappears just at the point of crescendo. As the music slows, he starts to reappear. A sketch as a tribute to Walt Disney. 

This title is also available on Ximena Cuevas: El Mundo del Silencio (The Silent World).

A Heretic's Primer on Love & Exertion

Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.

Big Ones Hurt

The unstable earth becomes the epicenter of this videotape document which explores—in a fractured way—the relationships between the people, places, and furniture that sit atop the San Andreas Fault.

Jennet Thomas, Because of the War

Because of the War things were changing. Very few toys or games were left and music was almost over. Tap water was tasting female and television only came in nasty spasms…

A surreal and sometimes comic meditation on how war affects the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.

Bayou of the Blue Behemoth

The waters run deep as massive jaws chomp and bubbles burst in a world gone mad with technological delusion and prehistoric puppetry.

Barbie's Audition

Gibbons plays the sleazy Director and lampoons the movie audition and its legendary corollary, the casting couch. Barbie is recast, not as the impossible-to-attain ideal beauty, but as the victim of sexual harrassment and exploitation.

This title is also available on Joe Gibbons Videoworks: Volume 1.

Bargain Basement Bumpkin

The five-and-dime store pulsates with the stench of she-who-shops. Follow this ragdoll apparition as she haunts the futuristic landscape of our buried past and rejoice in the resurrection of the cellar celebrity.