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Video Festival

Friday, November 11, 2005

5 PM - 7 PM and 9 PM - 11 PM

Saturday, November 12, 2005

9 AM - 1 PM and 3 PM to 5 PM

Jurors: Colette Copeland & Anita Allyn

Gum Traveling, Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand, Video, continuous loop, 1:00 sample, 2002

A piece of chewed gum travels on a car window. The gum takes on human-like characteristics, reminiscent of countless art-historical images, as it looks like a reclining nude with the road rushing by in the background.

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C&M , Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand video, 5:00, 2005

The simple everyday item, coffee and milk, becomes the metaphor for our physical and psychological space, which is incessantly fluxing between turmoil and tranquility. Our lives are in a state of flux, movement. In this video, male and female attributes are explored through coffee and milk as Stephan blows milk into coffee and Mary blows coffee into milk. We are doing the same task, but the formal elements are very different from one another, creating opposite imagery reminiscent of radar imagery of hurricanes, violent weather patterns and high tech satellite imagery. The slow biomorphic imagery connects with the pulsating pseudoscientific sound and the artistic lines blur as we paint abstract images with our mouths and hair. The typical and mundane are given a bigger than life presence that dissolves into a cinematic experience.

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Mary Magsamen & Stephan Hillerbrand

The collaborative husband/wife team of Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand have been working together over the past several years after meeting at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Magsamen and Hillerbrand had a solo exhibition of their "air-hunger" series at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. Their work has been included in group exhibitions and screenings nationally and internationally. They were awarded the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Residency in New York City at The Woolworth Building in 2003, a residency at the Experimental Television Center in 2004 and 2005 and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Creativity Award in 2005. Stephan has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study at ZKM artist space in Karlsruhe, Germany during the spring and summer of 2006.

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LANDMARK PROM, Tom Sherman, 2003, 8 minutes

I went to my daughter's high school prom in Syracuse, New York. I took my camcorder to document the proceedings. The African American kids were doing this elaborate red carpet affair, and their families and relatives were going crazy. These kids were dressed to kill. Hundreds of pictures were taken, and hours of video were recorded. The 21st century prom is a media spectacle extraordinaire, with stretch limos, top hats and canes. But for the girls, it's still all about the dress.

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Tom Sherman

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Union City , Delmira Valladares, 2005, 11.38 min.

This is a three –channel video installation based on a trio of fantastic, but true stories that occurred in Union City, New Jersey, a wildly eccentric, predominately blue collar Hispanic town unlike any other on the East Coast. The stories, which deal with murder, suicide, kidnapping, and forcible hypnosis, are a part of the growing group of underground urban Latino mythology, and I am particularly interested in exposing these hidden narratives. The storytelling devices I’ve employed are straightforward, and perhaps even threadbare; the stories don’t have definite closure, little character development, almost no dialogue. These are stories of the body, stories of the street. They are almost purely psychic in their representation, and I believe that my experience with experimental video has allowed me to find the head of the trail to treat narrative in a purely visual way.  

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Nightwalk, Ellie Brown, 2002

This video was produced at a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in the summer of 2002. It is a meditation on different states of consciousness and wakefulness. My body language and the ensuing shots present the notion that it is not always clear what is reality and what is a dream. 

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Untitled, Nadia Hironaka, 2003, 1 minute, digital video loop

This short animation suggests an uncanny inversion of the natural order. A dead figure lays face down on the forest floor while a ghost-like white deer circles in and out of the scene, hovering over the motionless figure. Innocuous video footage of a deer walking in a California forest has been altered through the use of rotoscoping (an animation technique used over film). This footage has been combined digitally with the artist’s own body (filmed in her studio) forming an eerie, open-ended musing on the relationship between the hunter and the hunted and the meaning of death in the otherwise blissful Arcadian landscape.

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Light Switch Daydream, Nadia Hironaka 2005, digital video loop

Light Switch Daydream creates a video version of a household light switch. Hung vertically on a small 4” x 6” LCD screen, LSD is caught in a disturbing decorative metamorphosis. Both the background wallpaper in the video and the hand painted floral designs on the switch ebb and flow as if stuck in a hallucinogenic flashback. The dreaminess, the cyber immateriality, and the details of a domestic space slowly slip into a state of the grotesque and unmanageable.

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Nadia Hironaka

Nadia Hironaka received her Masters of Fine Art in film from The Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and her Bachelors of Fine Art from The University of the Arts (1997). Currently she resides in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of Pennsylvania and at Temple’s Tyler School of Art. Active within the community she is a supporter of local art venues and a member of the non-profit artist-run gallery, Vox Populi. Additionally she is a member of the non-profit interactive media lab, Harvestworks (NYC), and was a artist in residence at FABRICA ( Italy). She was awarded a Peter Stuyvessant Fish Award in Media Arts and has received awards from: The Independence Foundation, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Leeway Foundation , Black Maria Film Festival , The New York Short Exposition Film Festival. Her films and video installations have been exhibited internationally in: Rencontres Internationals (Paris/Berlin), The Den Haag Film and Video Festival (The Netherlands), The Center for Contemporary Arts (Kitakyushu, Japan), The Black Maria Film Festival, The Donnell Library (NYC), The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The Galleries at Moore College of Art (Philadelphia), and Vox Populi, (Philadelphia). Upcoming exhibitions include radius 250, curated by John Ravenal (curator, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), pro:ME in Rio De Janerio, Brazil, and a solo museum exhibition at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Morris Gallery (2006).

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POCHUE, Animation and Sound by Mari Jaye Blanchard, Music Composed by Alvin Ealy 2005, 3 minutes.

The three-minute, hand-drawn animation Pochue is the story of my biological mother’s childhood, based on recordings from a phone conversation she and I had in the winter of 2005. Raised in a Hong Kong orphanage, my mother was unable to connect with my brother and me as children, and left us with our father when I was six. Fascinated but also frustrated by her constant revisions of history, ours and hers, I wanted to make a piece that reflected her story through my eyes. Our telephone conversation marked the first time I’d heard much of her history firsthand, and the creation of the animation allowed me to sympathize with her in a way I have never been able to, while still remaining disconnected by three thousand miles and almost twenty years.

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Mari Jaye Blanchard

Mari Jaye Blanchard is a painter, animator, and grocery store sign artist, who will soon be leaving Massachusetts for New York City. She earned her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she received the Audrey Robinson, Alumni Association, and Stuart Egnal Scholarship Awards; and her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art where she received the Lawrence Kupferman and Excellence in Art Awards. Her animation Pochue, which debuted at the PennDesign MFA Thesis show at the Ice Box Gallery in Philadelphia, was reviewed in The Philadelphia Inquirer (May 27, 2005) and Philadelphia Weekly (May 18, 2005). Her paintings have been shown in several venues including The Philadelphia Convention Center, The Croatian Cultural Center of Greater Los Angeles, and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. Mari Jaye’s interest in human interaction and communication led her to explore in her work aspects of her own relationships. She is driven to create works, which can effectively describe the emotional complexities of daily life.

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The spoken word vocoder text for the Humans Alone video comes from two passages from The Wealth of Nations on the division of labor and the exchange of goods. It is interesting to see contemporary Mainland China begin to become a profit motivated economy based solidly in Marxist theories. In this passage Smith introduces the ideas for the division of labor and the exchange of goods for profit. The spoken text contrasts the video images of the collective military formations and excercises on the field that the local militia was practicing at the time the video was shot. I am exploring the literal image of the collective power machine, the sacrifices people make for economic recovery, and the ways in which governments excercise power and influence over a nation. Americans are firmly grounded in a commodity culture and the consumption of goods. The Chinese are just beginning to head in this direction. How will western moderisim be integrated into the socialist fabric of China? Will the people fall in line and follow the messages of advertising like good little collective soldiers (consumers)? Or will they be resistant to commodity culture as the individual becomes more important in the new capital-marxist hybrid China?

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Scott Groeniger

Fundamentally, my artwork deals with issues concerning design as art and the role of the designer artist in political, social, and propaganda visualization. More specifically, I am concerned with critique of environmental issues such as the development of the American residential landscape for profit and the current environmental issues facing China. I am an assistant professor of digital media arts and design at Florida State University in Tallahassee Florida. Recent exhibitions include the International Digital Media and Art Association ideas Exhibition in Orlando Florida, The Phebe Conley Gallery in Fresno, California and the Anita S. Wooten Gallery in Orlando Florida. My current research has been awarded an FSU Cornerstone Grant and is focused on the design of the web portal www.envirochina.net and a collaborative exhibition in China that is being developed with the assistance of Taiyuan Normal University in Shanxi province, China and will be completed summer 2005.

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Comprised of silent, interstitial moments from Demille’s The Ten Commandments (1956)--extended through subtle looping and matting--Heston critiques Judeo-Christian mythology’s claim of divine origin/inspiration. Building on concepts from Thomas Paine’s infamous 1794 tract The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of Both True and Fabulous Theology , both “the words” and “The Word” have been excised from Demille’s epic, stranding American icon Charleton Heston (Moses) amidst the grandiose artifice of theology and Hollywood splendor. The awkward tension of these altered scenes makes mockery of the inherent profanity of theological portrayals and the conceit of the self-righteous.

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Matthew Suib

Philadelphia-based media artist Matthew Suib has exhibited installations, video and audio works and photographs internationally at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Kunstwerke (Berlin), Images Festival (’02, ’05, Toronto), and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre (NYC). Most recently, his work Cosmic Microwave Background with New Humans was exhibited in collaboration with Brooklyn-based collective New Humans at Apex Art (NYC). He is also a member of the Philadelphia artist-cooperative Vox Populi.

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Most Westerns transform a genocidal history into heroic fiction, using the myth of the frontier as a justification. The Monument Valley project is a parody of this kind of transformations and blurs the boundaries between past and present, fictional history and contemporary reality, and popular culture and fine art. It interrupts conventional constructions of narrative, history as fiction, nature as an open stage for expansionist fantasy, and expressions of control through objectification.

Monument Valley combines video footage from several sources that relate to the famous landscape and tourist destination of the American Southwest. Monument Valley, located in the Navajo Indian Reservation on the border between Arizona and Utah, continues to fascinate tourists worldwide, drawing from a mystique of the Hollywood cinematic "Western." The video juxtaposes contemporary footage of tourists visiting the site, shot by Liselot van der Heijden, with excerpts from the famous 1950’s Western "The Searchers" and a television documentary on the production of "The Searchers" produced around the same time.

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America video, Liselot van der Heijden, ©2004 4 minutes

" America" is a parody of the 2004 State of the Union Address in which George W. Bush mentions the word " America" 61 times. In this video everything is removed from the speech except the word " America" and the pauses or applause that follow or precede the word.

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Liselot van der Heijden is an emerging artist from the Netherlands who lives and works in New York City. She has shown art projects and videos throughout the US, Europe and South America. International venues include: Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Videochroniques in Nice, ZKM Zentrum fur Medien Technologie in Karlsruhe and Videonale 8 in Bonn, Germany. In New York City she has shown video works at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, the Queens Museum, Artist Space, Art in General, Schroeder Romero, White Box, and Momenta Art among other venues. She received numerous residencies from the Experimental Television Center and a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She has a BFA from the Cooper Union and a MFA from Hunter College. Currently she is teaching at Cooper Union and Pratt Institute. She is one of the organizers of Nomads and Residents.

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Ac-tu-al-i-ties  Peter Hayes

In the short video piece Ac?tu?al?i?ties I consider how history is not always clearly visible or readily interpretable. This seems especially true in the mediums of film and video, which have historically been seen as ‘truthful’ mediums. Utilizing video technologies, I change the viewing speed and re-edit portions of early films. I discover nuances in the original that are lost at speeds of 24 frames per second. These ‘lost’ details include original anomalies in the films themselves such as copyright stamps and ‘flash’ frames. There are also clues left by the archiving process that can take many forms. Some of these are: missing frames, documentation of cataloguing and signs of restoration and/or prior re-editing. Thirdly, there is evidence specific to film and the way it ages such as scratches, emulsion decay, and shrinkage of the film stock. 

In examining not only the films themselves but also ‘invisible’ evidence left by librarians and archivists, I comment on the content of the films and the changing technology surrounding the archiving process. The series of vignettes in Ac?tu?al?i?ties illustrate the different methods and outcomes of my continuing exploration into issues of temporal disarticulation, truth in translation, and how these ideas relate to the mediums of early film and contemporary video. 

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Peter Hayes

Peter Hayes investigates and re-interprets films from America’s past in order to recognize the impact this particular form of photography has had on our cultural landscape. In examining not only the films themselves but also evidence left by librarians and archivists, he comments on the content of the films as well as the changing technology surrounding the archiving process. 

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In Blowback (2005), appropriated b-roll News images of victims of war and natural disaster promenade through Central Park slowly appearing into the landscape, stirring forward and finally becoming larger than life. Caught in the crossfire of cameras, they are symbolic zombies in between life and death. The soundtrack, sampled and composed from classic horror movie tracks, serves to emphasize the characters truncated physical movements. The classic Zombie movie explores the idea of the abject—the breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse, which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality. Blowback seeks to both explore the Xenophobia that has become more direct since September 11 while also critiquing the media’s use of random images to support their stories—whatever they may be. The term “Blowback”, (negative fallout), was coined by the CIA in the 1950’s as a metaphor to describe the “unintended consequences of the US government’s international activities”.

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Karina Skvirsky

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a photographer and video artist; she lives and works in New York City. Her work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows at Jessica Murray Projects, NY, Smack Mellon, NY, Art in General, NY, StudioSoto, MA, Kunstahalle Exnergasse, Austria, Impakt 2004, The Netherlands, Le Centre pour L’image Contemporaine, Switzerland and others. She has participated in numerous residencies including: Smack Mellon, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell, Institute of Electronic Arts, Woodstock Center for Photography and others.

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Danse Macabre, Patrick Craig Manning (2001-2003)

Danse Macabre consists of twenty-one endlessly looping videos. Each video is created from secondary characters extracted from major motion pictures. The figures re-enact the motions they made in the two seconds before their so-called death. These deaths (which melt from our memories as soon as the next scene starts) are stuck in their ceaseless motion in purgatory. This temporally restructured, looping video becomes moving photographs that place the viewer inside a digitally extended moment. Disconnected from any physical source, video seems unreal, but becomes overwhelming. The viewer is placed inside events that might otherwise slip by unnoticed. The ignored and invisible are made apparent. Figures we forget the moment they are off the screen hover before us in ceaseless motion and the dead are transported to the afterworld.

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Patrick Craig Manning

Patrick Craig Manning is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis where he has been teaching since 2001.  Born in Seattle, WA, he received BFA in photography and BA in Archaeology from the University of Washington in 1995 and his MFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 2001.  Ranging from Daguerreotypes, to large format digital prints, to interactive web-based works, his photographic, digital, and video work invokes loss and absurdity to explore the political, cultural, and personal ramifications of the intersection of representation, language, and history.

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