Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.
In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sang the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. Oh My Homeland is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration.
Ouroboros: Music of the Spheres is Chapter 3 of Mysterium Cosmographicum.
"Positing a linear continuum, with 'nothing' at one end of the spectrum and 'something' at the other, at what point does 'nothing' become 'something?'"
white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a stroboscopic work made from fifteen films starring Charlton Heston. Each film has been algorithmically condensed down to thirty seconds in length. These fifteen condensed movies have been frame-by-frame chronologically organized and metrically inter-cut with two Heston film frames followed by two white frames.
The unusual combination of a sound like a singing saw accompanies sweet images of frolicking lambs in the meadow, galloping horses, and a strange boy, is eerily beautiful and pure.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.
This Is Not Beirut is a personal project that examines the use and production of images and representations of Lebanon and Beirut, both in the West and in Lebanon itself. It also records Salloum’s interactions and experiences while working in Lebanon, focusing on this representational process by a Westernized, foreign-born Lebanese mediator with cultural connections to and baggage from both the West and Lebanon.
The artists of the future and the past converge and converse as the funding dries up and extrapolation envisions extinction.
In this faux-recreation of a home-shopping network, Al Gore and George W. Bush offer you a 'super-premium' collectible lamp commemorating the 2000 presidential election.
People enjoy my company connects the privatisation of telecommunications with techno-optimism, euphoria and online communication in the lead-up to the millennium.
The film explores the privatisation of the Irish state-owned telecommunications company Telecom Éireann from the viewpoint of shareholders communicating on early online forums. The event is contextualised within ideologies of technological emancipation in the pre-millennium period.
This single channel tape was created from a 4-channel live mix of 4 VCRs, an A/V mixer, and a sampler. Hypnotic music, idiosyncratic singing, and soft, yet insistent voiceovers accompany television images portraying notions of happiness, the work ethic, and social success in a subtly alienating video collage. "Repeat with me: I now feel confident about opening to others and projecting charisma."
"Shaharazad is trapped at the Baghdad Hilton, so she conjures up an ironic story of the great King Bush's attempt at 'protecting one dictatorship from the attacks of another'" - Scott Andrew Hutchins
A rumination via handwritten index cards and an assortment of images recalling histories and ambitions of varied film productions.
A video that observes the thrill, terror, and boredom found in watching mass spectacles, and the unexpected loneliness when you miss them. This video speaks of both the power and the failure of the televised experience to bind us to one another.
Images cascade and collide in Acetone Reality, as animation, found images, and the artists’ own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith’s teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an “insane, yet validated reality."
Walt Disney's re-imagineering of Martin Scorsese's classic film Taxi Driver follows Mickey Mouse-obsessed Travis Bickle as he looks for love in a rapidly transforming New York City. A 'fair use' parody by Bryan Boyce.
"A brilliant video essay."
-- Roger Ebert
Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show, circa 1992.
8 stereoscopic slides taken to the jk-104 optical printer, shot frame by frame, by hand. This is the first hand processed color film I've made. The slides were found at a thrift store in Milwaukee, WI in 2009. They are of Cuba between 1948 and 1950 taken by an army officer while accompanied by his family. Their touristic gaze is reclaimed, by fragmenting their photographs into new possibilities of the frame, and reviving the bodies that may have perished by the revolution in 1952.
Something Else is a film about found footage as subject matter and Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia 1971 expressing her thoughts about the upcoming Miss Black Virginia 1971 Pageant.
Cast: Rene Marie.
This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.
Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escourts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.
Animal Charm's Ashley seems to develop a conventional story about a modern mother and wife with typically modern desires. But the insertion of incongruous soap opera scenes soon ensures that the seductive images take on an absurd and oppressive charge. “The antiseptic cleanliness of the imagery has a superficial appeal, but begins to feel claustrophobic — or toxic — after prolonged exposure.”
El Livahpla (Alphaville spelled backwards) is about the ways in which we "normals" are encapsulated in architecture and technology. Through the lens of Alphaville, we see into a past that exists in the present, while showing a future that looks old. It is a waking dream in which the objects of design that surround us fail to provide the answers or the escape that we seek.
This title has been remade as Une Ville de l'Avenir.
In a guided meditation progress is posed as a godly icon for worship. The inseparability of the human labor-spirit connection is probed. On-screen text cites The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, a 1998 book by Marshall T. Savage.
Presidential candidates are sold like commercial products and naturally television is the ideal medium. Political Advertisement depicts the evolution of political ads over the last 44 years, beginning with Eisenhower in 1952 (which was an unqualified success), and continuing up to the most recent ad campaigns for Ross Perot, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton in 1996.
A Wet Finger in the Air, a single-channel video, assembles appropriated footage of bilingual weather reports from 1980’s through 1997-era Hong Kong TVB and Pearl broadcasting stations into a hypnotic, randomized loop that repeats every hour. While these reels may invoke a kind of nostalgia, Sia's interest centers more on locating atmospheric and weather changes as a metaphor for the similarly unpredictable and slippery turns of history. The artist metaphorically raises a wet finger in the air to judge the invisible direction of the times.
English and Cantonese.
