Humor

Pastures filled with the bounty of a meateater's fantasy fill the screen with bellows of bovine origin as testosterone-driven madness runs rampant on 20,000 acres of Oklahoma soil. A lone female turkey stuffer prepares the goodies that will nourish the sunburned as they rocket skyward on the scales of numerical poundage to come crashing earthward in time for marinated hamburgers. A trip to the garden of Eden and its sanctuary for snakes with an appetite for dog meat.

A personal interpretation of the poetry and letters of T.S. Eliot that explores the ambiguities of language and space in a scenario built around an anagram. "A brilliant, absurd staging of Eliot’s The Waste Land in the local pub by the master of irony himself, John Smith. Smith’s use of the subjective camera tradition of independent film takes the viewer on a shaky journey from bar to bog and back again."

—UK/Canadian Video Exchange (touring program, 2000)

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

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.

A volcano self-destructs ages ago, leaving in its wake a great emptiness which is filled with all that is cold and blue. Into that blueness there gazes a horde of cellulite-laden damsels pursued by balding bullies with light meters unzipped, ready to specify F stops and G spots. A great and mythical beast lurks within and without, and below there spreads out, for all to see, the blue gaze of mount Mayama; once a vengeful bitch… now a magnificent ditch: a crater of unapproachable serenity and scorn: a crater lake.

After working in solitude at the studio, the artist leaves, uncomfortable with the idea of having to put on a face for the art world, where they expect you to say something articulate in order to grab the curator's attention.

Using the first color video camera, the artist questions where the devil might be hiding, and then takes a nighttime swim.

Modeled after NBC’s long-running science program Watch Mr. Wizard, this tape features Torreano as Mr. Wizard instructing a skeptical boy on how to build a diamond out of pieces of wood. The boy remains unimpressed until Torreano uses a “video paintbox” to create flashy special effects. Painter John Torreano’s use of galaxy clusters as a reference for his fake jewel studded canvases and diamond-shaped sculptures suggested the nostalgic format of this video profile by MICA-TV.

The waters run deep as massive jaws chomp and bubbles burst in a world gone mad with technological delusion and prehistoric puppetry.

A military installation is beset by unidentified flying objects while the personnel try to come to grips with their own mysterious yearnings and the cumbersome protuberances that protrude from their own species.

Pagan and Christian souls clash in this student-collaborated mix of the defrocked and the deflowered.

Greasepaint flows freely as talents of Tinseltown strut their stuff amid the rundown dreams of days gone by.

In Animal Charm's masterful example of video montage, a monkey is mesmerized as he watches two dolphins toss a woman from snout to snout. Go cross-eyed with cross-cutting. Sometimes, in order to prevent the insidious absorption of mass media, it is necessary to apply Vaseline to your eyes and ears. Other times, you only need to watch Stuffing — it’s inside of everything.

An urban and suburban blend of nerd, nebbish and nympho, united in the urge to create a cosmetic cosmology.