02:35:28 | 4 DVDs
Collection: New Releases, Single Artist Compilations, DVD Box Sets
Tags: Consumer culture, Death and Dying, Expedition/Travel, Family, Feminism, Humor, Latino/Chicano, Media Analysis, Performance, Sexuality, Youth/Childhood
Video Data Bank is proud to present the wonderful work of prolific video artist Ximena Cuevas in our latest DVD box set, Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas. This four volume box set features 25 videos by the award-winning artist, spanning 21 years, and is accompanied by a 75-page booklet containing the following essays that examine aspects of Cuevas’s work:
- The Truth-Telling of Ximena Cuevas -- Deborah Root
- Ximena Cuevas, That Sly, Gentle Brute -- Steve Reinke
- Consuming Passions: The Video Art of Ximena Cuevas -- Steve Seid
“Throughout each piece Cuevas displays her trademark irreverent humor, her biting social commentary, and of course, her grand and often flamboyant visual style.”
–Jim Mendiola SFB Guardian, 2000
“Ximena Cuevas is Mexico’s video artist extraordinaire: half magician, half mermaid, master of all she surveys. Cuevas looks upon her beloved metropolis of Mexico City with an eye both jaundiced and passionate. At the same time, she has turned her camera back on her own daily life and charted the quotidian pleasures and crises found therein. Her camera is expressive and inventive, her editing style jaunty and edgy, her musical taste unerring. Whether her subject is lesbian romance or heterosexual machismo, you couldn’t ask for a better guide.”
—B. Ruby Rich San Francisco, 1998
Included Titles
  "In this antiqued period piece, the morbid star, Lupe Velez, travels to Hollywood, Guanajuato, and Barcelona, seeking her own death." --Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archives, April 1998
Collection: Single Titles Tags: death and dying, expedition/travel |
A video poem about the nature of social relations and mass media, Half Lies exposes the seemingly innocuous ways we distort truth. Harmonious families, trade treaties, and current events are among the mediated realities that Cuevas...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: media analysis |
"The life of objects intrigues me. Apparently inanimate, they adopt the souls, actions and lifestyles of their keepers. Here, a bed testifies to what goes on behind the closed door of a decent family's bedroom." —Ximena Cuevas This...
Collection: Single Titles |
"I made this video after assisting at a conference where the artists acted like flies in a barnyard. They gathered tropical fruits to make it less disagreeable for themselves." —Ximena Cuevas This title is also available on ...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
After working in solitude at the studio, the artist leaves, uncomfortable with the idea of having to put on a face for the art world, where they expect you to say something articulate in order to grab the curator's attention. This title is...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor |
"You don't have to go to Hawaii to be in Hawaii. Nor do you have to be sensual to feel sensual. You look the way you are supposed to look. The sensuality of Hawaii completely fascinates me in this video." —Ximena Cuevas This title...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: expedition/travel |
Erase the 1940s. The desire to better appearances. To try to record a love story. It's in this way that a facial can become the biggest remaining pleasure. This title is also available on...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: body |
This is a video of musical terror where I superficially—this is the beginning of a larger project—look at one of the Mexican phenomena that horrifies me the most: internalized racism, being ashamed of one's own roots. The fantasy of waking up...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: latino/chicano, race |
The innocence of creating a mirror, only to repeatedly crush it underfoot.
Collection: Single Titles Tags: conceptual art, youth/childhood |
"The palms of Lana Turner's hands were full of scars; the technique she used in order to achieve melodrama was to tighten her fists, digging her fingernails into them until she began to cry. Day after day, soap opera actresses smear Vick's...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: latino/chicano |
Dorothy doesn't reach her dream of the Emerald City. Rather, she will have already been over the rainbow by the time she arrives at the worst corner in Kansas. This title is also available on...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
As sad as it can be to be trapped in a TV show, singing words you don't even know the meaning of. This title is also available on Ximena Cuevas: El...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: television |
A soft-focus close-up of mouth and lips is set to the sounds of lovemaking. A soft-porn video on how easy it is to get porn. This title is also available on...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: sexuality |
Cuerpos de Papel is a dense visual meditation on sexuality, loss, jealousy and intimacy. It uses rich sensual images to weave a digital portrait of an intimate, erotic, and emotional past. As the images transform, we are left with a...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: sexuality |
Blind man: “It is bad to be alone.” The Creature: “Alone, bad.” —The Bride of Frankenstein It can be so bad to be alone that even an artificial heat is better than none. This title is also available on...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: autobiography, mental landscape |
“Take back the airwaves: Mexico’s video art doyenne Ximena Cuevas books herself onto the tabloid talk show Tombola (Raffle), toying at first with whimsical deconstruction until she turns the whole affair on its head by seizing the...
Collection: Single Titles |
"Emptiness: I just watched your latest video, Colchones Individuales (Single Beds), Volume 1: Desolacion, and I wanted to write you about it. Oddly, Single Beds sums up much of what I have been thinking lately. In these times of...
Collection: Single Titles |
The vacuum cleaner becomes the device of the feminist 'liberation', or the monster that devours us. —Insite 2000 program, San Diego Museum of Art This title is also available on ...
Collection: Single Titles |
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...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: consumer culture, humor |
Turistas deals with the letdown of a world that is pre-mediated and post-digested—a video travelling guide that updates the 19th century artist's Grand Tour and downgrades it to 21st century not-so-Grand status. —Maria-Christina...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: expedition/travel, humor, latino/chicano |
"Hell is oneself. There's nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to." —T.S. Eliot "La Puerta makes us spin out of control in the long and cruel corridors of an institutional nightmare." —Insite 2000 program,...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: |
"Perhaps Cuevas' most chilling work, Cinepolis forecasts an image-driven invasion of everyday life, picture-perfect and unnoticed. This alien intrusion comes in the form of a fully branded consumerscape that cheerily foists fast food...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: consumer culture, media analysis |
A world with no escape... from the surveying cameras, an eye, a presence, always there to control our minds and movements. Looking even for the most secure little movements of life.
Collection: Single Titles Tags: mental landscape, surveillance |
An homage to Luis Bunuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz with a twist to these days control systems of security. From the moment we are suspects we are potential culprits. Therefore we are all guilty.
Collection: Single Titles Tags: crime or violence |
A montage of architecture and cabaret, juxtaposing a second hand view of New York as refracted through this artist's eyes.
Collection: Single Titles Tags: architecture, city |