Memory

Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually stunning work that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. 

"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."

— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018

In(sul)ar marks the dichotomy between reality and fiction, by creating meta-images of an imagined island, where time and space are confused with each other. In(sul)ar reflects the relation between space, memory and history, as well as the mapping of the body and its relation with architecture, and identity. A women walks through spaces of ruin and old erased memories in spaces located in Azores, an Island in the Atlantic which is at the crossroads in between Europe and Africa. 

The Diaspora Suite

Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, NY ( an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to use an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and McPhee’s real time “sight reading” of the score.

This is the audiovisual translation of the Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History.

For 5 months, Clarke held workshops with young women, ages 18-23 years old, who were incarcerated at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility in Camarillo, California. As part of the weekly classes, the wards painted their faces and made digital self portraits. In the corner of the room was a video camera mounted on a tripod with a remote control. Each week the women sat alone in front of the camera and made a Diary tape. Inside Out includes several of the diaries.

“When I moved to Hudson Valley, NY state in 1984 after being tied to Tehching Hsieh in his ART/Life: One Year Performance, I began meeting remarkable elders over 80, and sometimes 90, years old. They became my mentors, guides, friends, helpers and spiritual directors. I took hours and hours of my footage to video artist Tobe Carey and he and I collaged it together collaboratively to make this document of these helpers along the way.”

--Linda Montano

A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her reach to a subject she is outside of. Vever grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti.

A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke Loa, or god.

Emerging from one reel of Super 8 film and a brief prompt given to a group of friends, Keep in Touch gestures a sense of being together-in-difference that brushes against the fleeting, unstable solidarity. Fragmented with moments of silence, uneasy gossip, and coded bodily communication, the work consider the complexity of contact, touch and becoming a subject.

A personal essay about connection and disconnection, in and through different realities.

REVOLVER is a short film that weaves the perceptual phenomenon of pareidolia (a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist) with an oral history narrated by a descendent of Exodusters. Nicodemus, Kansas (USA) was deemed a late 19th century refuge for Exodusters—Black people from the southern United States who fled violence and inequities following the Civil War. Guided by memory, history, and rumor of a Black utopia, REVOLVER proposes a psychogeographic history of place infused with visions and dreams.

Sassy, iconoclastic, and never-married, Los Angeles filmmaker Susan Mogul rides shotgun with ex-lovers, almost lovers, and her Dad, in a road movie turned inside out. Conversations with each driving man - pornographer, tuba player, TV critic, long haul truck driver, and more - are catalysts to reflect upon the past and comment about the present.

Commissioned by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for the occasion of Eiko receiving the Sam Miller Performing Arts Award. Premiered at LMCC’s A Toast to Downtown on December 9, 2020. Shot at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island.

Performer Eiko Otake.
Director/Editor Liz Sargent.
DP Minos Papas.
Production by Cyprian Films, New York.

Here, amid tall, swaying trees, you'll inhale the toxic breeze of desire... Here, you'll understand words in the bubbles of babbling brooks deep in forests; 'words' that echo out from beneath bedroom sheets, where skin wrapped souls yearn for tranquility.

Locke’s Way is the photographic path to knowledge, full of twists and turns, treacherously steep. What has happened down here? A family’s photographs tell us everything and nothing about the subterranean past. "One of the central questions of philosophy has always been: what can be known? Locke’s Way provides a vivid illustration of this perennial philosophical dilemma. In this short video, Donigan Cumming is preoccupied with the story of his older brother, who seems to have been brain-damaged and spent much of his life in institutions.

Shot in Naples, Vienna, and New York, Some Chance Operations explores the notion of an archival form, in this instance film, as an unstable memory receptacle that can vanish. History and how it is made is meditated upon as one of many chance operations. The filmmaker Elvira Notari, who had a film production company in Naples from 1906 to 1930, plays a significant role as an impetus for Some Chance Operations. Despite the fact that she was a prolific filmmaker, producing over sixty feature films, only three remain intact.

These are the western lands of the mind. The western tracks in the land. The western landscapes of our time. The wasted times of our lives. Our communal Selfie. So is the rest of the Capitalocene civilization.

Paulette Jones Morant waxes poetically about being one of the first Black Women scholastic athletes at the University of Virginia.

This title is only available on Can You Move Like This: Black Fire.

This is a re-destroyed film that I was unable to finish in 2013. Filmed both in ruins: at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco and in final domestic spaces occupied with a former partner. Film was destroyed in ocean water.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually stunning work that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. 

"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."

— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018

As If the World Had No West tells of the journey of a young woman who travels through the desert and who, through her relationship with the Mirabilis, ancient plants, listens to the cosmos. She listens to her elders, the earth, fire and air. The drought calls the rain, the ashes show the way, the plants tell her the stories of colonization, of the beginning of the world when the desert was still scrubland and there were trees and flowers.

Memory Palace is a short video grounded in the personal history of the artist. A discovery of a photo album activates memories of physical spaces, which in turn open doors to reminiscences of past family life. Inspired by the classical method of loci, the film presents a woman — singer/songwriter Alice Smith — at work in Los Angeles.

Another in a series of sculptural films. Like it’s partner, 3 peonies, this is a short 16mm film made as a memorial for my grandmother who passed away in 2017. Her voice can be heard on the soundtrack singing a bit of song. What goes when the body goes? How many parents have we got stacked upon us into eternity like ladders to the afterlife?

- Stephanie Barber