Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.
A woman is lying on her back on the floor. She seems to be tied down on the ground, but she is holding her ankles with her own hands. She wears only tights and a pair of high-heeled red shoes. Her hair-covered face makes her an anonymous victim of the camera, which is making converging circles around her body.
This title is also available on Hester Scheurwater Videoworks: Volume 1.
Hey Bud revolves around the suicide of Bud Dwyer, a government official who killed himself before a television audience. Zando compares the suicide to a kind of pornographic sex act that plays upon the tension created between exhibitionist and voyeur. It forces viewers to take either an empathetic position vis-a-vis the exhibitionist, or to act as voyeur through release of the repressed desire to see the forbidden face of Death. The piece attempts to understand the power gained through exhibitionism, and how that power is lost through death.
The Sky Is Falling... is part of an ongoing series of performances that make up The Data Humanization Project.
As Laurie and her child's father lie in bed, taking an afternoon nap, a large balloon resting on her belly inflates under the sheet and explodes. A humorous time-lapse of her developing pregnancy, A late afternoon... suggests a dream she is having about the transformative experience of impending motherhood.
The death that happens to others, the death that is in you already, the life that is in this death.
Sentences is a beguiling, hypnotic meditation on the poetics of space.
This classic feminist tape deviates from David Byrne’s and Jonathan Demme’s popular 1980s versions of suburban life, True Stories. Rather than poking sarcastic fun at the woman locked in the split-level, Suburban Queen poignantly evokes a daughter’s longings. Portraying the relationship of a mother and daughter inextricably bound yet puzzled by each other’s lives, Faber recounts her frustration with her mother’s depression and passivity, and her fantasy of how her mother might transcend these conditions.
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.
In this world, motion capture technology translates movement into data that can be unbound from the human body. Yvonne’s No Manifesto becomes a framework for understanding the existential impact of this new dataset. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without the basic premise of embodiment and breath?
A man is shot inside an empty room and he moves and takes on positions continuously out of center. The nature of the lack of balance is invisible and his ability to stand up in spite of unnatural postures is inexplicable: this videowork has been realized without special effects but is simply the result of a real shooting of an artificial condition.
"A chamber drama set in the confines of an apartment’s sun room, this video further explores visual themes and obsessions found in my earlier works and adds in a few new ones for good measure. Earlier motifs seen here are lightbulbs in pendulum movement, tabletop antics with simple household objects, Christo-like fleshy textures, sketchbook pages torn from their binders, book pages, bookshelves, and flowers. I play a vaguely Walter Mitty-ish figure, who imagines himself as a conductor, as Orpheus, and as conflicted characters in a Greta Garbo movie.
Nascentes Morimur grew out of a series of works on autopsy — an earlier video and a number of still images — that were exhibited together as Like a Shipwreck We Die Going Into Ourselves. In an interview on that body of work Wojtasik said: “In the end, doubt has been raised. One starts to look around the room at the living and the dead and question how real one’s own and others’ identities are. At the same time, one may be filled with simultaneous wonder and dread at the sheer fact of being alive in the body.”
-- Kustendorf Film and Music Festival
Andro/lesbian body-doubles wrestle each other in an outer-space fantasy.
Performers: A.K. Burns & K8 Hardy
Audio: Matt Volla
This title is also available on A.K. Burns: Early Videoworks
A troupe of male and female jugglers and musicians perform for a growing crowd in Central Park, New York, led by Hovey Burgess and Judy Finelli. The sun is shining, and the troupe are skilful, playful, and flirtatious.
five more minutes is an exploration of grief. Two women spend an afternoon recreating lost time. What begins as play-acting breaks open into a world where the tenderness and sorrow of having to say goodbye exist untempered.
The repeatedly distorted, primate behaviour of an (ani)female carrying her baby, reflecting the pain and suffering provoked by the mother/child relationship.
Begun as a consideration of the upgrading from manual to digital film editing techniques, Transitional Objects explores the anxiety and loss inevitable in such a transition while also suggesting the consequences of other life transitions. The video takes its title from D.W. Winnicott's theory of children's use of transitional objects to negotiate the gaps between internal reality and the shared reality of people and things.
An instructional road trip clarifies how to prevent a baby from choking. The giver of said instructions communes with stray dogs along the ocean front. She builds seaside graveyards, petit and monumental sand mountains. She nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.
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.
“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”
-- Graham Harvey, Animism
Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.
Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to “disarm my movies.” “I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive.”
In conversation with David Getsy — an art historian focusing on queer and transgender methodologies in sculpture theory and performance history — Cassils discusses their monumental performance artworks and inspirations.
Thornton asks viewers to question how one sees “space" — whether literally or figuratively — and what is being revealed? Images of a sonogram session grant viewers access to what is typically reserved for medical analysis — “inner space.”
Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.
