Rackstraw Downes’s “observation” paintings, executed on-site at ponds, intersections, and baseball parks, began as a mischievous response to the dogma of style and modernist criticism.
“There was a tremendous intellectual back-up, essentially against a lot of the figurative painting being done in the ’60s,” Downes says in this interview with Robert Storr. “If I show my slides in an art school I’ll get, 'Your paintings are very nice but how can you go backwards from Cézanne?’”
One of my weather diary series out in Oklahoma. The tone is wistful, the surroundings wispy (with some puffs of pungency). The TV is on and the porcelain is smeared with some residue atrocity from a previous passion. But all is well as emptiness persists beyond the four walls of this prairie mausoleum.
1.1 Acre Flat Screen is a 45-minute video about a year-long effort to improve a lot of 1.1 acres of desert land in Utah, which we purchased on September 4th 2002 on eBay. The video starts with ways of finding a lot in the desert, using satellite images, topographical maps, a compass and string. It displays ideas and plans on how to improve the land’s value and documents our preparations to face the unforgiving desert.
A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.
The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.
"Living on the slopes of the volcano Vesuvius is a strange contradiction: always in stress and yet also sleepy, waiting for what might happen. In close cooperation with the Osservatorio Vesuviano and several inhabitants of the 'Red Zone' of the volcano, Rosa Barba constructs a lyrical portrait of this area, which shelters Mafia members and illegal Chinese immigrants. Historic footage, measurements, maps, and aerial shots try to capture what is always uncertain."
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
Earthmoves is a continuation of Semiconductor's exploration into how unseen forces affect the fabric of our world. The limits of human perception are exposed, revealing a world which is unstable and in a constant state of animation as the forces of acoustic waves come into play on our surroundings.
The frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry and the religious right are woven through the petrochemical landscapes of Southeast Texas. This short video harangue questions land use policy as it serves the oil industry, patriotism as it absolves foreign aggression, and fundamentalism as it calcifies thinking.
Path combines striking imagery of the earth’s topography from the air, the ground, and beneath the sea. With calming shots of living ocean coral and acrobatic aerial footage of the Illinois prairie, Path investigates the physical sensations of the body as it moves through time and space, closely observing the natural world.
E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism. Originally designed as a monumental space for public performance and collective acts of solidarity to the Fascist regime, this landscape was in fact never inaugurated.
A familiar landscape comprised of big box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. An enigmatic protagonist reveals little moments of subjectivity that escape into the piece like a contaminant, rupturing the view and evidencing the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to "be wired" and in turn, to be connected, in today's global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire--in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China--and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.
“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”
-- Graham Harvey, Animism
Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.
"A group of students and teachers gather in an historical mansion in the woods of West Virginia for a week-long retreat in spoken Latin. I observe and I participate while navigating the errata with my camera."
— Sky Hopinka
The fear of bridges.
The Situated Cinema Commission Project for WNDX - Winnipeg’s Festival of Film and Video art
Director of photography: Eric Cinq-Mars
Consultant: Daniel Watchorn
Music: Frères Lumières
Design: Sébastien Aubin
This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.
Going Around In Circles continues Holt's interest in perception and point of view. A board with five circular holes is placed in front of the camera. The holes are covered and uncovered to reveal five people enacting a set of activities that involves walking between five spots and turning in circles.
The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.
Rosa Barba’s work Disseminate and Hold investigates man-made geographies and landscapes, and how these are often deeply enmeshed with political agendas and utopian visions.
Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.
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.
In 2012, eteam visits Mars and Moon Townships in Pennsylvania. Using a documentary approach, they position themselves as cultural anthropologists who view the towns as if they were simulated environments on Earth, training grounds for eventual living on the planet Mars and Earth's satellite, the Moon.
eteam's book-form reinterpretation, Buzz Cut, will be included with every institutional purchase at no additional charge.
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
