A friend visits from Canada and we relive the past as the future becomes more and more obscured by a cloud of burning vegetation wrapped in cigarette paper and exhaled by a pair of lungs unable to supply a brain with the necessary oxygen (mercifully) to remember the past.
The Tiny Ventriloquist is an omnibus video subtitled Final Thoughts, Series Two. It traces the movement of a voice from being rooted in a particular body (the artist's) to its dispersal through a variety of dummies.
From the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the innards of a castle of contraptions, this video explores the creative bric-a-brac of several entities who pioneered a wired frontier filled with fire wires and fire water. Join them as they schmooze among the futuristic flotsam of fame and fortune cookies and rejoice in the eggplanted paradise that awaits the monsoonal mush of high desert drenchings.
In this wistful tape, Segalove looks at how her childhood vision of the future holds up (or doesn't) in adulthood. Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
A three-day teleplay done at CalArts takes a sordid behind-the-scenes look at an art school professor’s life.
A video in two parts (Starstruck and MGM: Movie Goddess Machine), focusing on celebrity culture, identity, and the body. “What is Liz Taylor doing in my bed, in the bed of my friend Leland, as he dies of AIDS?” These and related questions are enacted in a series of encounters between the artist/ performer/ spectator and a host of famous people from la Liz to Anita Hill. In Joan Sees Stars, Braderman addresses the subversive potential of masquerade in a parade of video-assisted star sightings.
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 on Ximena Cuevas: El Mundo del Silencio (The Silent World) and Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.
In this short but provocative tape, recorded August 4th, 1971, Carol Vontobel “interviews” Nancy Cain who is speaking about her “coke addiction problem” under the pseudonym Nancy X. Nancy’s addiction, the viewer soon learns, is not to cocaine but coca-cola. As such, the segment unfolds as a spoof, both playfully calling attention to the proliferation of depictions of, and conversations about, the pervasive use of drugs in the U.S. in the early 1970s.
Tension between a man and his handsome young rival (a Ken doll) erupts into violence. Their interaction devolves from a series of tussles to a spanking.
This title is also available on Joe Gibbons Videoworks: Volume 1.
With various trips to the seashore, this summer travelette becomes an inner journey through mythical realms populated by rubberized horrors. The viewer is transported into a caregiver’s nightmare where mother and son share the fruits and bones of undigested demands. These figments of fermented atrocities pile up in a barrage of bestial assaults inflamed into hellish reality by reading material of unwholesome content. Fantasy lumbers into reality with an unrelenting menu of severed ties and familial knots that tighten around the neck of he who dabbles with dementia.
The artist Bruce Conner is featured in this videotape which bounces east and west, depicting the fragility of holistic hooligans in a world of hit-and-run encounters, Prozac, and pizzas. A meditation on faulty plumbing and paradise lost... but not forgotten!
A trip across the bay to Concord yields a harvest of non-fruit-like beings who celebrate a housewarming that simmers with macho machinations and family discord. The mood is upbeat while the company is lowbrow, and coming out of the bushes rather than the woodwork.
In a world of Internet and high technology, there still remains something so arcane, so simple and extraordinary, so absolutely incredible as a circus of educated fleas. Marvel at Maria Fernanda Cardoso's work as the powerful Brutus (The Strongest Flea on Earth) pulls a locomotive that weighs 160,000 times his own weight. See the flea ballerinas dressed in micro-tutus, dance to the rhythms of Tango! Hold your breath as the highwire artists defy gravity on the tightrope and swing precariously on a miniature trapeze.
A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear-projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women, recycled from an educational film, become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation.
The story of a matron and a midget in the heat of an unbridled passion. The colors run thick and heavy for paint and prurient pleasures as the electronic canvas unscrolls to reveal a bevy of beasties and beauties of nature and the unnatural. A non-stop melodrama of a patron of the arts shot by real art students in a real art school! A collaborative project I worked on with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute.
A series of abrupt vignettes and transitional montages paint a torrid portrait of a tropical isle in the grip of terror. Linda Martinez stars in this latest atrocity from studio 8 in the San Francisco Art Institute and her co-stars don’t find her too hot to handle! She plays a travel agent booking honeymoon holidays to a sex-infested island haunted by lascivious cadavers and voodoo hi-jinks. Lots of color and rubberized hot action!
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.
"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings. I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke
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.
First there is a stop at Salt Lake City and a massive dose of theological imagery that prepares the viewer for the hellish landscape to come—a land of igneous outcroppings and noxious emissions peopled by mammals of exquisite bulk. A countryside plundered of its potatoes by behemoths who head for the hills with their bounty of starch and iron. Follow them to the heights of Yellowstone National Park and the depths of Pocatello, Idaho. Follow them if you dare!
"You are invited to Jim’s party! Snake optional."
--Cinematexas Festival (Austin, 2001)
"Three more sing-alongs, this time with swans, a snake, and the Red Army Chorus."
--L.A. Freewaves Festival
This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.
Alienation in academia beneath the chandeliered opulence of a political correctional facility that caters to clashing cultures with chicken fajitas and carefully worded alphabet soup. Features George at the Flaherty Seminar and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Behind the skyscraping walls of a neon lit asylum, the frustrated inhabitants therein erupt and engage in a psychological waltz that couple fact with fantasy in ways that open windows of the madhouse to the sanity of daylight.
This title comprises Grip of the Gorgon (2001), Midnight Mass (2006) and Celestial Murmurs (2006) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Is everything larger in Texas? Everyone knows that Texans like to show off "big-ly" and they like to perpetuate the myth in a big way, too. The World's Largest features larger-than-life-size monuments built primarily in small Texas towns, the monuments in commemoration of a local resource.
The unstable earth becomes the epicenter of this videotape document which explores—in a fractured way—the relationships between the people, places, and furniture that sit atop the San Andreas Fault.
A film about haircuts, clothes, and image/sound relationships.
"This four-minute film explores our response to stereotypes—aural, visual and ideological. Smith signals these stereotypes to the viewer through a chiefly associational system, which deftly manipulates the path of our expectations. The structure is stunningly simple and deceptively subtle. We are taken on a journey from one concrete stereotype to its diametric opposite, as images transform and juxtapose to, ultimately, invert our interpretation of what we see and hear."
—Gary Davis
