Chicago Art

This video is a moving personal documentary about Danny, a friend of Kybartas who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1986. This powerful work explores the reason for Danny’s return home and his attempts to reconcile his relationship with his family members who had difficulty facing his homosexuality and his imminent death. Retracing Danny’s memory of his once-high lifestyle in the clubs and gyms of Miami, Danny avoids sentimentalizing its subject as it juxtaposes images, text, and voice-over to build a sense of the psychological struggle brought on by Danny’s impending, premature death.

Hokey Sapp Does SPEW features Kate Schechter performing her invented media personality Hokey Sapp interviewing some of the luminaries at SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention hosted by Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago in May, 1991. SPEW brought together artists, writers, editors of zines, performers, video-makers, activists, and bands from throughout the US and Canada, and marked the explosion of queercore subcultures through unabashed fashion, outrageous politics, humor, and joy.

Polish-American arist Ed Paschke (1939-2004) received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961 and his MFA in 1970. Paschke was known as a member of the late-1960s Chicago Imagist movement, a group of artists who called themselves The Hairy Who, whose expressive style of figurative painting was rooted in outsider art, popular culture, and Surrealism. Paschke's fascination with the print media of popular culture led to a portrait-based art of cultural icons. Paschke used the celebrity figure, real or imagined, as a vehicle for explorations of personal and public identity with social and political implications. 

O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian Militant film Our Small Houses into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.

"'I am nice. I... am nice. I am... nice," repeats the narrator, in this personal and highly poetic exploration of the construction of self. Mirra favors repetition as the device for reconstructing the stage of development when a child learns its name. Like a bedtime story, the narrator unfolds the tale of a child who identifies herself as a bear. The story becomes increasingly complex as it moves from one voice to two, in which bear and child gradually become distinct entities and the haiku poetry of the child’s identification, 'I, Bear,' is ultimately forsaken for the name Helen.

What are all of these photographers trying to capture, and just who is collaborating with whom? This short piece could be a take on fame and the cult of the personality — or a tourist portrait with the audience as subject.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.

An homage to Chicago's East 95th Street Bridge, Calumet Fisheries and to a couple of the city's infamous brothers.  The take-out shack, originally glimpsed in the background of a scene from The Blues Brothers, still operates.  It has become a real-world portal to a cinematic past.  Propped along the edge of the 95th street drawbridge, the building is framed by the towering infrastructures of the Chicago Skyway and Calumet Harbor.

Budlong Memorial Middle School is heating up. Queer Teen Romance is a charmingly perverse homage to the after-school special that tackles bullying in a hormone-fueled flurry of forbidden sexual fantasy. When Bryce, the school bully, picks on outcast Kevin, a group of tough (and brightly accessorized) girls decide to teach Bryce a lesson. But maybe Kevin doesn’t want the pain to stop? 

An experimental documentary about resistance, balance and fame. Kings of the Sky follows tightrope artist Adil Hoxur as he and his troupe tour China’s Taklamakan desert amongst the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy.

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. 

"I'm not going to go to the Anne Frank House—I don't think I could take it—being a tourist is bad enough—though I'm not really a tourist—I'm here working—my camera's the one on vacation—taking holiday sounds and images—it's having a nice change of pace—for me it's still the same old thing—talking and talking.

Executive produced by Sara Diamond at the Banff Art Centre, co-produced by Michelle Baughn and Suzanne Lacy, directed by Tom Weinberg and Dick Carter, and edited by Holen Kahn.

Fuelled by lavish doses of disjointed hyper-editing, super-talented Jim Bailey dances with wild animals in Animal Charm's hot and exciting performance of "Fever."

In 1998 I made a sculpture of a decapitated head. I featured it in a photo and video. I thought of the head as a character whose adventures would be documented. The name O’Malley was inspired by Chicago’s Irish heritage (I was living in Chicago then). O’Malley’s Head Part 1 was a photo of the head placed on top of the garbage cans in the alley behind my apartment building. I lived right by an exit ramp from the Kennedy Expressway, one of the last before you reached downtown from O’Hare Airport. Sometimes people would exit there and dump things.

A two part treatise on needs, met and unmet. A painter putters around his apartment. Spoils his cereal with rotten milk, gets a do-over with a fresh gallon. Over the course of the filming the relationship between the performer and the filmmaker unravels into disclosures of childhood sexual abuse. Rotten milk is the metaphor for all human suffering.

"The gerbil has long been associated with New World capitalism because of its incessant energy. The Golden Age of Hollywood takes on the history and evolution of this delightful household pet."

— International Film Festival Rotterdam (2003)

— "Jim Finn's Wüstenspringmaus, a well-sprung, rear-screened account of a gerbil's life in the '70s."

— Guy Maddin, Film Comment, January (2004)

This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.

This flashy drama about theater life was made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute and follows the various personalities that make up the show-biz milieu of a fictitious city on a fog bound coast. The fog is thick and so is the plot as it plunges into a series of dramatic interludes which include musical numbers, war scenes, ballets, and erotic shenanigans involving the living and the animated dead.

Spanish artist Jaume Plensa (b. 1955) creates sculptures and installations that intend to unify individuals through their relationship to memory, the body, and spirituality. Often referencing literature, psychology, biology, and history, his practice speaks of a shared humanity despite the world’s complexity. In this way, language acts as a metaphor, and the human figure a universal symbol. Plensa is perhaps best known for works that engage groups of people in public spaces.

Habit is an autobiographical documentary that follows the current history of the AIDS epidemic along dual trajectories: the efforts of South Africa’s leading AIDS activist group, the Treatment Action Campaign, struggling to gain access to AIDS drugs and the daily routine of the videomaker, a veteran AIDS activist in the U.S. who has been living with AIDS for more than ten years.

The small cruelties of a subliminal fog roll in.  A pandemic thwarts intimacy. Perched from their little planets, this cast of wildly colorful creatures question their futures and navigate the longing for connection.

This is the fifth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke.

Appropriated network-TV footage of Jimmy Carter’s "I see risk" speech from the 1980 Democratic Convention meets Reagan’s gloomy inaugural ride through D.C.: "If you succumb to a dream world, you’ll wake up to a nightmare."

This title is also available on Presidents and Elections.

Listen To This is a fragment of collective memory that finds critical relevance in contemporary Queer discourse.  Tom Rubnitz weaves narration, image, and a form of temporality, dislocated from ‘real time’, into a video where artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s loss and anger is palpable.

Between basement and stoop, PBRs and politics, two bros discuss rock music history, protest, incarcerated relatives, fine cheese, the book plot of Bridge to Terabithia, and lesbian girlfriends.

Dykes and trans guys take over the Jackhammer for a punk show.

This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.

Swamp Swamp and Wurmburth are each comprised of a series of tightly cropped shots of small, hand-made table-top sculptures or "sets".  Paint and many other materials that behave like paint (i.e. lotion, shampoo, foodstuffs) are blown through these environments with plastic tubing and forced air.  Each edited collection of shots makes an endless cycle of primal sludge and rupturing goo.