W/O 6 VIDEO FESTIVAL
SHOWTIMES
UMAINE MUSEUM OF ART Oct. 7th, 2009 at 6pm
SPACE GALLERY Nov. 18th, 2009 at 7:30pm
CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART TBD
SELECTED ARTISTS/WORKS
K.I.T 13m
KAYCE BAYER
K.I.T. is an acronym most often used in teenage note-writing that stands for “Keep in Touch,” which appropriately frames this piece as an amateur exchange between friends. After saving my cell phone correspondence—both incoming and outgoing, pix and text messages—for 6 months in 2007, I organized them into a timed animation. Interested in how this technology facilitates and mediates communication, I wanted to be able to watch the conversations unfold, revealing a range of relationships. Examining the somewhat personal dialog of my immediate community, the timing pairs the banal with the poignant with the downright pointless.
Drishti III 6m 30s
JEN-KUANG CHANG
“Drishti III”, a term describing visions one experiences during meditative states, is the third installment in the series realized when taking up an artist residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in 2008. Both computer-generated and sampled soundsare incorporated as to achieve the intended variety of sonic landscapes tomatch the vivid, but delicate visualization. By presenting this composition, the composer invites listener toactively contemplate one’s Self and the interaction between Self and the immediate surroundings that might be fallacious and misleading to one’s trueunderstanding of inner divinity.
Come Back to Jamaica 1m 11s
ANDREA CHUNG
“Come Back to Jamaica,” was a marketing slogan used by the Jamaica Tourism Board to entice tourists from the United States and England, encouraging them to “come back to the way things used to be.” I have cut out the figures, which are cast as “real Jamaicans,” from the commercial which allows them a well-earned holiday. By doing so, it places the setting on naked display and forces the viewer to confront the circumstances from which the subject has taken a temporary leave of absence.
On The Roof 4 m 16 s
HENRY GWIAZDA
My work is about the choreography of reality. It’s about the way everything moves and is interconnected to create beauty. On another level, this work is about repetition and memory. How do our perceptions change over time experiencing the same events? Each small, choreographed scene can be appreciated for itself, but on subsequent viewings, takes on a separate meaning. They become metaphors for our lives, our dreams and ourselves.
Variations on Byker Shore 2m 35s
ANTON HECHT
Many people were filmed in St Michael’s church in Byker Newcastle, individually, over the course of a day, playing single notes on various insruments to create a note bank that andy jackson the composer used to create the score that you see and hear. Most of the participants had no previous musical experience. Myself Anton Hecht bought it all together, with Richard Lawson on camera. The work was produced by as part of the Off-Centre project. The main body of people came from the community group Aspire.
Weather You Remember 6m 35s
MAURA JASPER
Weather You Remember is a series of video “weather reports” delivered by senior citizens, as they recall and comment on weather for the location they most identify as “home”. Participants in this project are asked to make observations about changes they have witnessed as indicators of past, present and future “weather” conditions. They are asked to begin with a weather related memory. This excerpt is the account of two women who witnessed a devastating tornado in Worcester Massachusetts on June 9, 1953. They were both recorded at the Worcester Senior Center on April 15, 2008. They have
never met.
Hauntology 5m 50s
WES KLINE
In the single channel video Hauntology (2007, 5:50), the artist
attempts an ethics of identification, appearing in the video dressed
theatrically as the appearance of Nathan Leopold in 1924. Throughout
the video, the Kline echoes/distorts the historical description of
Nathan LeopoldÕs avocation as an ornithologist, taking photographs
of birds throughout the south Chicago swampland, near the Indiana
border. Periodically, historically incorrect music stutters and
emerges, including Chicago house music and selections from the
culmination of Benjamin BrittenÕs chamber opera Turn of the Screw,
suggesting multiple hauntings of history and place moving across the
landscape.
J9 9m
JULIAN KONCZAK
J9 is a video installation that explores the relationship between journey and narrative; it uses sound and image to draw the audience into the rhythmic cycles of travel. Working with a 9 minute editing structure generated from both audio and visual pacing, multiple versions of a sequence are created using a video database of a diverse range of physical locations. The installation makes reference to the use of “computational video” as it incorporates software systems to sequence the audio and visual video edits. The use of a recurring form is intended to evoke the way in which we map our own internal experience onto diverse locations and cultures as we travel. The soundtrack is composed from location audio samples and musical elements, allowing the audiovisual rhythm to evoke an emotional sense of transitions through different physical environments.
City Order 3m 33s
RON LAMBERT
After decades of renewal, infill and implosion, we see a continual rethinking of the life of American cities. The end result of urban growth is grid upon grid, melting together, forming an indistinguishable aesthetic of the city. City Order is a visualization of these effects. The soundtrack is from a 1950s informational film about urban progress and the need to remove older architecture in favor of new, more efficient construction. The overall aesthetic is discordant, both visual and auditory. The friction also exists in the flux as cities constantly reconfigure themselves.
How to Make a Table 2m 30s
LEMEH42
Taking inspiration from the famous italian song from the 80’s, this animation analyzes ironically the terms of industrial production using a famous brand known for its ambiental care.
The Butterfly Lovers 5m 30s
LILY & HONGLEI ( XIYING YANG, HONGLEI LI )
The Butterfly Lovers[Marker] is an experimental video piece combining finearts and film approaches to translate an ancient Chinese story intocontemporary visual language. This reinterpretation of Chinese folktale metaphorically reflects on Asian diaspora, meanwhile aims at developingaesthetic traditions with new media art. In the film, dressing in traditional Chinese opera costumes,the lovers roam in Manhattan’s night. With the dreamlike dislocation, the filmdepicts the isolation in the heart of the characters, which implies the vulnerabilityand resistance of the Chinese culture during the process of westernization.
Green Chair 2 3m 47s
ELIZABETH RILEY
“Green Chair 2,” is the second in a projected series of “green chair”
videos. The premise of this series is that among primary, and
differing allegiances, there are many perspectives through which to
broach the world and organize experience. The series gives the artist
the chance to live out, and to react to, her own cultural training,
and to make new choices or be cued by new circumstances. In this
second “green chair,” clips from the first “Green Chair,” captured in
rural upstate New York, have been altered, and new clips from New York City added, as nature, culture and human persistence interface.
Connect with Carol 5m 29s
LIZ RODDA
In the two-channel video, Connect with Carol, a self-proclaimed spiritual guide named Carol encourages her audience to witness “the magic and the majesty” of everyday objects, such as a rose. Playing beside Carol is a video of a stone which appears to be rocking back and forth of its own volition. In the company of one another, the videos address a range of topics including identity, cultural expectation, the supernatural and faith.
Just The Way You Are 3m 31s
LIZ RODDA
Just the Way You Are pairs two separate YouTube videos side by side: a series of girls doing the splits, desperately aware of the camera, and a boy clumsily playing an instrumental version of Billy Joel’s Just the Way You Are on the piano. Each of the videos features a lone performer who has become a part of a worldwide network by broadcasting their performance online. The video re-introduces a range of topics including the role of the viewer, life as a teen, sincerity and collective aloneness.
First Firing 2m 45s
KELLY OLIVER AND KEARY ROSEN
First Firing is a collaborative video work by artists Kelly Oliver and Keary Rosen that explores the conjunction between language and imagery. The audio portion was written and performed by Keary Rosen and then set to video shot and edited by Kelly Oliver. Each artist performed their part of the work individually and without input from the other.
Blink 3m 21s
JOSEPH OSTRAFF
On occasion, I have found myself considering the turn signals of cars as
they line up in the turn lane. There is a unique cadence to each line of
vehicles and from time to time, when the line is in place long enough,
several cars will blink in unison. Strangely, this always comes as a
surprise to me.
Peel 7m 40s
SURABHI SARAF
Peel presents a visual echo of the present instance: it takes an unexamined moment and gives it life. The transitional motion of going to the fridge to get an ingredient is stretched into the echo of an unforgettable instant, and what emerges is an examination of the subtlety and hidden beauty of that moment.
Adaptation Fever 15m
HONG-AN TRUONG
Adaptation Fever uses found footage of Viet Nam during French colonialism to explore questions around the politics of representation and the construction of identity and difference in relation to history, time, and memory. Playing with the idea that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience, and also by the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the Other’s desire for that present, this video appropriates archival moving images of French colonial Viet Nam as a way to consider postcolonial subjectivity and sentimentality. This work attempts to examine the complex dynamics of media and temporality; memory, lived time, and forgetting; and the uneasy division and tension between the “mythic” and the “real” past.
How To Clean a Puddle 1m 49s
ROLAND WEGERER
Jumping in a puddle will be continued to an operate and excessive final.
What in childhood after a few jumps was stopped is completed here. Water,
mud and the black clothing generate short sculptural images and meet in
their social definition in opposition. The radical intervention into the
puddle of water, the pace of jumps and soiled pants connects us back in our childhood wishes.
The without Borders Video Film Festival is a juried selection of 19 videos/films that were selected from more than 120 submissions from 11 counties. This varied collection of work by an international group of artists evidences the range of work in film and video today. Seemingly too diverse for a uniform topic, these works none-the-less all reference the concept of "conjunction" through a variety of definitions of the word. Some are poetic, some funny, some abstract and some are visually arresting, but all evidence a high degree of creativity that is a hallmark of the best work being produced today.
