Mental Landscape

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.

Taking its title from the sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey—the treacherous spirits whose sweet voices lured sailors to their death upon the rocks—Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, visual puns authored by a mischievous agent. Mocking laughter that shatters the illusion and causes viewers to doubt the assumptions implicit in their viewing disrupts stills of what seem to be unpopulated landscapes.

The time is now!  The present can be replaced in real time. Not quite yet by the future, but very easily by the past? eteam's video Track One is a replay of such time disjuncture. As they keep following the memory of a yellow cab that keeps driving through the now deserted streets of Taipei, their pastime augments itself with a mesmerizing sense of reality.

The Fool melds varied footage while a narrator describes a brief encounter with a former love interest. A performance of a gymnastics routine merges with iconic Baroque paintings; club scenes mix with a day at the beach. Taking the viewer on a hazy, dream-like journey, the images at times seem to illustrate the story being recounted but elsewhere fail the narrator entirely: in one surreal moment, a large fig tree rolls across a hallway on a skateboard.

"By way of lush formal and associative shifts, Hearts Are Trump Again evokes the ever-present tension between seemingly polarized states of experience. Desire and repulsion; freedom and constraint; pain and pleasure all find articulation in images of ferocious dogs and mock conversations about childbearing. Tonally complex and viscerally rich, Hearts Are Trump Again is a lyrical exploration of emotional weather."

— Brett Price

Five prayers are sent skyward, and five curses get directed inward by those living in the purgatory of "modern life"... Attend this moody Mass in the church of "thoughts and feelings"... It will uplift you.

This title comprises Wrestling with Angels (2015), Hiding Places (2016), Unfinished Paradise (2018), Late Night Blues (2016) and Nightscape (2017) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

How do we tell the story of a life? What cruel reduction of an image will stand (in the obituary, the family photo album, the memory of friends) for the years between a grave and a difficult birth? Public Lighting examines the current media obsession with biography, offering up “the six different kinds of personality” (the obsessive, the narcissist) as case studies and miniatures, possible examples.

A deceased hoarder, reconstituted through technology, recounts a difficult childhood as inhabitants of a virtual world struggle to reconcile materialistic tendencies. A scientist leads an effort to understand the passage of time, but the data is unreliable. The question remains, what happens to our things after we are gone?

We asked 12 people to walk 4 identical routes through the course of a day and a night, always attempting to repeat the manner of the first time. As they moved they concentrated on their steps and their rhythm and the repetition immunized them from having to make sense of their movements. They moved as if consumed by a single thought. Unaware of the passage of time. They re-ran the night during the day, and mixed the darkness with the light.

— Flatform

"John Smith uses humour to repeatedly subvert and frustrate potentially threatening content in an economically constructed tale of the narrator’s descent into paranoia and, ultimately, oblivion, as he is pursued, haunted, and finally destroyed by a mysterious peripatetic black tower. Throughout, both verbal and visual imagery are low key to the point of banality; shots of familiar inner city landscapes—terraces, tower-blocks and scruffy wastelands—are set against a narrative that is laconic and bathetic in the best traditions of English suburban comedy.

"i am very grateful that my 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) series has shown internationally over the last couple years and is recognized by viewers, reviewers, critics, and curators as doing decolonizing work as a feminist project that queers and glitches the Western genre. 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) questions the quintessentially American Western in the forms of experimental films and games that are made from glitches and noise, pushing boundaries of legibility and tipping over threshold states of stability.

Combining Rubnitz’s skillful manipulation of the familiar “look” of TV shows with an extraordinary range of characters, performer Ann Magnuson convincingly impersonates the array of female types seen on TV in a typical broadcast day. From glitzy to drab, from friendly housewife to desperate evangelist, Magnuson is a one-woman universe appearing on every channel, the star of every program—giving her all as the chameleon woman who is always on display.

See a boy turn into a tiger. See the lad vomit colors of the rainbow. Watch him toss marbles onto wet bathroom tiles while holding up a green skull. See him squirm on warm bedsheets, wearing only soiled socks on his feet…… This kid has a mouthful of flowery words to spit out to you !

This title comprises Witchery (2008), The Tiger (2009), Swan Song (2009), Medusa's Gaze (2010) and Opal Essence (2010) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

The archive is not a repository of cultural memory, but of dreams, a bank of dream material. Both memory and archive embrace death, but from contrary positions. The archive is a mausoleum that pretends to be a vast garden. Memory is an irradiated zoo in which the various animals are mutating extravagantly and dying slowly.

-- Steve Reinke

This sumptuous Valentine sent by Miss Philly unfolds with the lavish lushness of love for HIM whom she adores.

From an isolated wooded cabin a trans man star gazes, scruff chats with guys, watches YouTube tutorials, takes drugs, and lies about taking drugs - feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Relative to the immensity of longing, the bodily insides become both portal and lens through which to probe the porousness between interior and exterior, the micro and macro. Nudes and landscapes are equally erotic, as Eros is an issue of boundaries: When i desire you, a part of me is gone.

An example of what Reeves terms “video poetics,” layered images of a deserted village in the Spanish countryside play counterpoint to poetry by Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda. Using slick production techniques, Reeves marks the passing of time and human presence with a video transparency effect. What we see is a ghost of what was. Reeves’s precise editing makes for an extraordinarily fluid tape, as images seem to fly through the landscape, through past, present and future.

“Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park, before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.”

-- Michael Green, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

...my Americana, 2023

Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work.

A nocturnal COVID-19 memoir. 

Piano assemblage and image sequencing by Bob Snyder. Images by Sara Livingston.

Purify shows a disconnected women washing herself in blood.

An epistolary, musical reimagining of Wuthering Heights by Branwell Brontë — the tubercular, alcoholic and opium-addicted brother of Emily Brontë. When Branwell — the ne’er-do-well, tubercular brother of the Brontë sisters — discovered that Emily was writing her first novel, he offered to be her editor. Once he realized that he was the model for the alcoholic Hindley Earnshaw character, he reimagined the story as a musical memoir of his own life with Hindley as the hero.

Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved ones.

Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation, soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible, and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.

Das KunstKabinett or the Cabinet of Curiosities is a 'microcosm' or theater of the world, a memory theater which provides solace and a retreat for contemplation.