This distanced narrative, which approximates a soap opera or a TV interview of bereaved relatives of a victim, confronts two means by which food is used as a weapon: the internalized oppression of self-starvation as a consequence of social learning (anorexia nervosa), and starvation because of poverty and economic domination. In a scenario that merges documentary elements and theatrical acting, an impossibly young couple is addressed by an unseen questioner.
A domestic portrait rendered at miniature scale, Dust Studies brushes along the edge of what can be seen. Staying close to the ground to collect what gathers there, the film looks deeply for everyday things and finds them drifting in the pleasant, meandering headwaters of a young child's language.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
John Killacky is Eiko's long time friend. It was in July 2018 when both of them were attending the tree planting ceremony of their mutual friend Sam Miller at the Jacob's Pillow that Eiko invited John to join her Duet Project. John proposed to create a video work that they both speak to their dead mothers.
After exchanging their writings, the video was shot and edited by Brian Stevenson in the studios of Vermont PBS on November 22, 2019.
Special thanks to Larry Connolly.
All About A Girl is a story of a girl coming to terms with aspects of her own identity and how they relate to the expectations of others. The girl tries to balance the real world that she lives in with the world of her imagination as personified by a dead rat. She appears to have more in common with her small, wild corner of the backyard than the pristine world her mother creates around her.
The artist's mother comments about the status of women while reading a doll house sized book titled Encyclopedia of Famous Women.
An 11-minute tape focused on greenish night-vision textures and certain high-camp performance values, organized around a dysfunctional family "celebrating" several birthdays. We see an elderly woman in apparent dementia staring as her "party" goes on around her, squares of blood-red sheet cake passed around the bedside. Monologue fragments purvey tragic bitchitude, wherein any birthday is a mere occasion for embarrassment and cruelty.
Three insightful and funny vignettes highlighting Segalove's father's quirky traits, habits, and interests.
First Ramon, and then Rufina moved to San Diego County in 1980, unable to raise their family as landless sharecroppers in Mexico. Though uneducated, they manage to work as a landscape contractor and housekeeper, respectively, buy a house, and raise 6 children who complete high school and maintain successful management jobs.
"On my mother’s side there are two lands I come from, separated by the Atlantic ocean, all those fathoms deep. The lands of my grandma and grandpa. I had been through the lands of my grandfather, that is where I still live. The now tamed prairies, missing their bison herds and fenced out into neat geometrical patterns. My grandma comes from a similarly colonized land, Scotland. Ruled by the British Commonwealth and forbidden to speak their language. . . I had never been to Scotland. And I wanted to see my Grandma’s traditional territory.
Company Line is a film about one of the first predominately Black neighborhoods in Mansfield, Ohio. The title, Company Line, refers to the name historically used by residents to describe their neighborhood, located on the north side of town close to the old steel mill. The Company Line began during the post–war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late 1940’s. The neighborhood was purchased in the early 1970s and its residents were scattered throughout Mansfield.
Right after the first Iraq war, the filmmaker visits his family in Iraq. He tries to reconstruct the war from different points of view, all depicted on the same screen at the same time: U.S. airplanes dropping bombs, his parents fixated on the television, and the family welcoming him back.
This title is only available on Radical Closure.
I'm here to bring you the Truth and the Pleasure
Here to show you the meaningful form
It's going to feel like a new kind of leisure
It's going to smell like a freshly mown lawn
I'm installing a personal toolkit for thinking
Especially customized only for you
You enable it just by the action of blinking
From now on your thoughts will be focused and true
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual, and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire, and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
A HalfLifers journey to a lush interior landscape where some domestic chores and an unexpected encounter provoke a crisis at Mission Control, paving the way for a seasonal reflection upon the meaning of "home."
This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.
In 50 Blue a young man (the artist’s brother) pushes an elderly disabled man (the artist’s father) in a wheel chair through a muddy landscape. It is a long and exhausting trip to an unknown destination only discovered at the end. After an arduous struggle the two arrive at the edge of a grey lake where a 10-meter high guard tower stands. The young man ties the wheel chair to a rope and hoists the old man up on the tower platform with the help of eight men, all dressed in yellow plastic raincoats.
Thinking of herself as a spy assigned by the female sex, Green reinterprets baseball’s symbolism—its womblike landscape, its cycles and rituals—and constructs an iconography that pays homage to the female. In one magnificent montage, numerous phallic symbols pass by as Green sees the real purpose of the game: baseball is the only sport about returning home—and where is home...? In a mother’s belly. With humor and irony, Green creates a tape that is both a personal revelation and a heretical portrait.
The sale of a plot of land marks the kickoff of an unlikely road trip in this strange American odyssey. When eteam buys an acre of the Southwestern desert on eBay, the deed fails to arrive and the pair attempt to track down the phantom seller. Children in tow, the artists embark on a noir-inspired search through Colorado, Arizona and the American West to locate the shadowy landowner and claim their portion of the vast desert.
Based on the filmmaker's autobiography, You Are Here examines the search for home within our era of transnational displacement. As the son of Italian immigrants, the filmmaker examines notions of home and belonging within the context of his ethnic origins, but also extends this in relation to his identity as a gay man. The film chronicles his trajectory from his familial home in Italy, to his native Canada and beyond, and weaves a compelling portrait shaped by memory and the realities of the present.
In Dreams and Autumn is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
This is the last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, and the text Hello Trouble as well as a series of etched photographs.
Loss Prevention combines documentary and fiction to tell the story of Irene, arrested at the age of 79 for stealing a bottle of aspirin from a Miami Wal-Mart and sentenced to ten weeks of Senior Citizen Shoplifting Prevention School. Narrated through the voice of her daughter, this film explores the alienation of aging and the evolving relationship between a daughter and an elderly mother.
Double Sigh is a video in which my mother reenacts a moment from my adolescence. In confronting the viewer directly, my mother's anger, frustration and sadness are imposed on the audience.
– Julia Hechtman
This title is also available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show, circa 1992.
Between the Frames is a series that offers a glimpse into contemporary history that is already past, a portrait of personalities and opinions shaping what and how art reaches a public forum.
The Dealers: Between the Frames, Chapter 1 and The Galleries: Between the Frames, Chapter 3
"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.
A series of intimate video-8 vignettes depicting the fierce love between Malverna and Sandi, 88 and 22, grandmother and grandson. The two playmates dress up drag-esque for this moving portrait of a woman’s lifetime struggle with gender and sexuality. Since Malverna's death, Tomboychik has become a living memorial to the intensity of her spirit.
