Maria-Christina Villaseñor, curator: While the designation "independent" has been largely redefined by the commercial film market to mean "not quite Hollywood," and mainstream media has become increasingly homogenous, the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowships program continues to celebrate and actively support diverse film and video-making practices. Frames of Reference features recent projects by Fellowships grant recipients from the United States, Brazil, and Mexico that cut across class, political, ideological, and national lines and include similarly various genres (documentary, experimental, and narrative). Regardless of their diversity, however, the artists featured in this exhibition are united in examining the media and its pervasive influence in contemporary culture. The artists also often share a simultaneous reflexivity, considering their own practices as media makers and inscribing the production process into the text of the artwork. At the foreground of each piece is the effort to make the work not an entertainment or diversion but a means to understand and more subtly engage the complex of issues informing and changing our world today. In little over one hundred years, the moving image has transformed private and public life and continues to increase its influence as it is incorporated into digital communication technologies. In recent years, the medium itself as a primary object of attention has moved beyond academic or avant-garde circles into the broader entertainment realm. The result is a commercialized metamedia culture. Today, Hollywood films, television, and newspapers are filled with narratives, articles, and punditry focusing not on public and political events themselves, but rather on media coverage of the events. At the same time, the marketplace has co-opted numerous pioneering styles developed by visionary avant-garde film- and video-makers who sought to react against and set themselves solidly apart from the mainstream. The independent film- and video-makers represented in Frames of Reference continue to develop works and strategies that resist simple commodification. Thus they do not comment on the media from a disengaged distance or surface level, but rather plunge deeply into it, investing and even implicating themselves in their critiques. Questioning their own methods and impulses, these film- and video-makers look both outside themselves, to consider how their work affects their subjects and audiences, and within, to question their own ideas and assumptions as they undertake a film or video project. The thematically grouped programs in Frames of Reference feature films and videos from both the U.S. and Latin America, attesting to the power of these works to transcend national borders. Some works offer pointed examinations of how the media contributes to or destabilizes our sense of place and local and national identities. Others consider identity and representation by bringing to the forefront issues such as the degree to which social and ethnic groups are present in mass-media depictions, in what circles these images are disseminated, and how these portrayals are being shaped: in essence, these works ask whose stories are being told, by whom, and to whom. The series also examines the ways in which the industry-determined conventions of broadcast television and commercial cinema shape our expectations for and understanding of stories and events. Some makers explore and critique the public's fascination with celebrities and the media's role in shaping popular icons, while others engage in collaborative projects with socially marginalized individuals or groups ignored by mainstream media, allowing us to share in more complex and diverse stories and types of storytelling. The shaping of history and memory is a key issue for many of the artists in the series who explore how photographic images and cinematic portrayals can codify images within particular historical frameworks. Archival and newsreel footage are reworked to examine assumptions of documentary "truth" in nonfiction filmmaking. The role of the documentarian is also scrutinized, including the imagemaker's relation and responsibilities to a community and its representation on film or video. Personal documentaries not only depict the filmmakers' own concerns, but also show how the wide availability of cameras and small-gauge film- and video recorders has led to the creation of unofficial family archives, raising the question of what is and isn't captured by the camera. In both narrative and documentary works, traditional genres are consciously mimicked and morphed, giving way to new hybrids that reflect contemporary issues in non-didactic, yet thought-provoking and ultimately serious, encounters. Humor is used to destabilize our assumptions about documentary truth, to engage complex, controversial social concerns that the mass media often shies away from, and to create sardonic reminders of the dangers of allowing media technology to grow unchecked. The makers in this series also remind us of the pure joy and magic of the moving image—of seeing a mechanical reproduction "come to life." Their efforts unearth the wonder with which moving images were first seen and recorded at the turn of the last century and carry us no less magically forward into the present one. Maria-Christina Villaseñor Associate Curator of Film and Media Arts Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum