Plus 3 Ferris Wheels

The Fragileness of Bone, 2007
Running Time: 4:58 mins
Valerie A. Brodar – Colorado Springs Colorado

The Fragileness of Bone is a poetic meditation on the discontinuous and complex self-identity created through the ethereal, persistent, personal, cultural, mythical, and ancestral memory that locates the self. Memory strikes unexpectedly like lightning. Memory haunts the shadows dancing out of reach. Memory torments with obsessive reruns. Memory reconstructs an alternative narrative. Memory kindles flames. Memory reawakens trauma. Memory confuses. Memory comforts. Memory forgets.

In this current state of global unrest with its rapid shifts in technology, boundaries, fears, and half-articulated desires we create imaginary landscapes to ground ourselves: quiet introspections that long for the ordinary in the extraordinary world. We construct poetic labyrinths from the familiarity of pleasure, trauma, isolation, connection, and ambivalence intrinsically bound to people, places, events, and objects disembodied in time. Weaving, unraveling, and recreating we build an evolving and forgetting self that is both subtly present and intangibly past, an intricate tapestry of multiple interiors, a dialogue of memories lost and found.

Aquatic Origins, 2005
Running Time: 40 secs
Esther Maria Probst – Syracuse New York

Art has always been my self-induced drug. It is the calming substance that produces beautiful imagery from the ruins of stark, provocative scenes. I recently stumbled across a major threat during a subliminal, unpronounced reflection. That internal disclosure pinpointed the culprit, namely the “camera.” Through the eye of the lens, I encounter a completely different and unexplored world that escapes the realities of the average person. This unmarked landscape transforms and pervades into my slanted world. Emotion, confusion and wonder drip from my finished work. I am fixed for the time being.

www.esthermariaprobst.com

Conjuring Prophecy, 2007
Running Time: 3:08 mins
Heather Stratton – Kalamazoo Michigan

“Women are not imaginative enough and intellectually complex enough to kill themselves.” -Emile Durkheim

Self-eradication due to religious fanaticism has long been a preferred way of communicating with and serving deities. Having been privy to the mourning process of both Catholic suicide and Evangelical suicide, I found a confusing dichotomy between both of the families’ thoughts about their newly departed loved ones. It was not what I expected. Is it possible that religious doctrine can be revised to suit the current needs of a family in grief? Is it possible that the soul of a self-murderer will go to heaven just because the family cannot handle the truth and reality of their own teachings?

There are many reasons people self-eradicate; psychosis, depression, guilt, revenge, boredom, chronic pain and even religious fanaticism (please refer to the first reason). Although all self-murderers come to the same conclusion, their means remain as unique as their selfish desires. However, we may never be completely sure if all self-eradications were actually self-murder. Especially in the case of women, since they are not complete enough to commit such an act. In this event, we must consider what will become of the female soul after supposed self-murder (the wisdom of Durkheim allows us the knowledge and comfort that women never kill themselves). I bet they all become martyrs and saints.

www.heatherstratton.com

In Still, 2007
5:00 excerpt – Full Running Time: 27:05 mins
Ron Lambert – Andover New York

In Still is a single channel video piece running 27.5 minutes. It is a non-narrative work dealing with landscape imagery and the loss of specificity of place as our culture becomes accepting of forms of simulation. The need for speed and production forces one to feel satisfied with experiences provided via the television and computer. The piece is a series of video segments that move off the screen by stretching lines of color, which blend into the next clip. The videos of landscapes move off the frame just before the viewer becomes comfortable with the site. This is strengthened with the soundtrack that consists of the ambient sounds of the landscape clips and digital sounds that mimic the scenes of the digitized lines as the landscapes move out of sight. The piece questions if we losing something as we quicken our pace, or if new ways of experiencing life are gained.

www.ronlambert.com

Legacy, 2007
Running Time: 2:37
Gary Lindgren – Somerset New Jersey

My art is rooted in painting and I approach video the same way that I would an empty canvas. The footage and editing equipment become the paints and brushes. All of my work begins with a desire to create. Being creative means taking risks. The actual process itself becomes a record of an attempt to be creative.

‘Legacy’ uses footage from The State of the Union Address. I removed all of the words that were phony.

On and On, 2007
Running Time: 5:00 mins
Blake Shirley – Manchester Connecticut

Utilizing the fractured language of stop-motion animation coupled with a paradoxical character in motion, I explore the complexities of perception, memory, and question how we create meaning. This video contains many possible narratives illustrating the point that meaning is always in play, constantly rearranged by our thoughts and associations. This video, as in life, contains moments that seem to be clear, if only fleeting, while resounding of uncertainty. Fragmented moments of everyday scenes, distorted and shifting scale relationships and the emphasis on fractured narrative demonstrate this. This video serves to exemplify these parallels with our own infinitely layered existence.

Cultivate, 2007
Running Time: 1 min
Megan Berner – Iowa City Iowa

For me, art—and life—is a never-ending process of change and movement. Thinking about the processes of growth and time and the idea of constant change and recycling, I began to use grass as a medium for my artwork. It seems to be a perfect metaphor for the ideas I am interested in exploring. It is a simple entity yet it works within a system of networks and layers of interconnectedness—most of which are invisible on the surface.

Growing grass is also a metaphor for the process of creation. It starts out as a small seed, an idea, and as you create a place to cultivate it, over time, it grows into something more. And it keeps on growing, transforming with each recycling, into something more, something new. Grass has the power to transform energy. And isn’t that what we do as artists, as humans?

Cultivate centers around these themes of growth, process, and creation—specifically dealing with the artistic process.

www.meganberner.com

Surrender, 2006
Running Time: 2 mins
Jodi Hays – Nashville Tennessee

Surrender (riffing off the Wicked Witch of the East skyline declaration “Surrender Dorothy”) uses found footage of Dorothy Gail from The Wizard of Oz fighting external wind to get back to the safety of her home. She seems to be in a digital mess-a storm of pixels. The work is a meditation on struggle and triumph. Voice credit: Chelsey Scott

www.jodihays.com

Biscuits Thrown From a Window, 2006
Running Time: 2:00 mins
Dave Ball – London United Kingdom

I make work based around subversive interactions with the stuff of the everyday world. The aim is to interrogate and interrupt existing codes of behaviour. By giving visual form to minor transgression the works aim to derail the normally smooth running of sense seemingly inherent in the way things are. Through humorous incongruity an alternative, non-sensical, ir-rational, or sur-real alternative state of affairs is presented.

The works however tend first to be utterly rooted in the real, the rational, the sensible. This is the basis from which they operate. Specific places are described, recognisable situations are encountered, familiar art-historical references are utilised, well-understood thought-processes are employed, and straight-forwardly logical conceptual premises are executed. From within these solid groundings in normality humorous incongruities and minor subversive jolts can thus be effected.

The works are based in a playful philosophical attitude; poetic, humorous and questioning, they are intended to act as visually articulated minor ruptures to the way things are. Specifically influential philosophical figures include the Lyotardian notion of “paralogy” (in which a particular figure of thought is rendered nonsensical according to a dominant theoretical model in place); a Deleuzian notion of “deterritorialisation” or “becoming-differently” (in which particular states of affairs are understood as merely habitual stopping points containing within them the potential for a flight to an alternative state); and a Badiouian “evental-break” (where something unaccountable happens, something radically inconceivable according to already-existing structures of understanding).

Some of the outcomes of this have included: doing literally hundreds of actions with biscuits, throwing vegetables in the air, swinging bread around my head in a park, arranging cheesecake slices in a large circle on a woodland floor, writing ephemeral and poetic messages in second hand books before selling them, interrogating house-plants, pushing toy cars around city streets, cataloging garden hedges, and making meticulous drawings of local bus stops.

www.daveballartist.co.uk

Gary Builds Louisiana, 2006
Running Time: 4:14 mins
Daniel Kariko – Tallahassee Florida

Louisiana is experiencing the highest rate of coastal erosion in America, losing about one hundred yards of land every thirty minutes. That is a size of a football field every half-hour.

The barrier islands of Southeast Louisiana are some of the youngest and most unstable landforms on earth. They average 5000 years in age, and are rapidly changing shape and disappearing due to the man-altered flow of the Mississippi delta. Timbalier Island, for example, averaged 20m/year towards Northwest, during the last century (U.S. geological survey). During the early 1800’s most of the barrier islands served as the summer resorts to Louisiana’s upper crust. In 1856 a devastating hurricane hit Isle Dernieres causing great loss of life and property, nearly splitting the island in half. Since then more than a dozen major storms, including Katrina, changed the geography of the coast. Today, all except Grand Isle are sand bars with a little more than skeletal remnants of industry.

These Islands represent the “First Line of Defense” against such hurricanes. Our, often adversarial relationship with the world outside ultimately reveals our inability to adapt to the natural process. We stop the flooding of rivers by building levees, yet that destroys the wetlands that protect us from storm surges. This video work sets out to illustrate the results of such failed relations. Daniel Kariko, 2006

www.danielkariko.com

P.S.; 28 Afterthoughts in Search of Before, 2007
Running Time: 4:51 mins
Celeste Fichter – Brooklyn New York

P.S.; 28 Afterthoughts in Search of Before, 2007, is a single-channel 5 minute video that imagines postscripts to stories that have never been told. While each of the 28 afterthoughts suggest that they could be the beginning, middle or ending to an unknown narrative, they are independent ideas and in fact their own short stories; some as short as a second.

www.celestefichter.com

Inside the Circle, 2005
Running Time: 4:20 mins
Thanh VanVo – Muncie Indiana

Fire. One of humanity’s greatest tools since the beginning of time. We harnesses its power; it lit our paths and raised civilizations.

I have always been fascinated by the beauty and unpredictable forces of natures. Some of the interpretations of these works address my thoughts dealing with cycles of nature as well as human life.

Like nature, the element of fire and its property can be harnessed for useful purposes. On the other hand, because of its inherent characteristics of unpredictability and extreme volatility, fire cannot be easily be easily tamed.

The video entitled Inside the Circle explores and addresses my deep curiosity with the cycles of nature. My interest in nature is rooted from childhood experiences where I lived near rivers and mountains in Vietnam. Than and now, I find great joys and comforts when I have the opportunities to experience various bodies of water, forests and living creatures that embody those habitats.

Desperado: Rodeo Duet, 2006
Running Time: 1:58
Anna Campbell – Grand Rapids Michigan

The dual narratives in this piece describe the continual, slow-motion falling of rodeo cowboys as they are thrown from horses and bulls, and a homophobic encounter at a gas station that is too banal to justify an emotional response. Combining these accounts underscores both the continual threat of harassment that can be expected by queers, and the cowboys’ tragically hopeful insistence on riding, given the inevitability of their crashing. Heroics traditionally associated with a cowboy and exhibited here by the narrator further blend these figures together, complicating a fixed understanding of either one.

www.annacampbell.net

Cerebratorium, 2007
Running Time: 3:53
Bryan Lauch – Pittsburgh Pennsylvania
Petra Pokos – Ljubljana Slovenia

Cerebratorium documents a collaborative visual experiment that re-contextualizes familiarity through a celebratory ceremony. In reversing the sequence, variant meanings arise. Rhythmically, 76 wine bottles’ fragments appear to magnetically re-connect from the floor, through the air, to the hand, to the table. This visual offering is to compel question and celebrate living.

Clearing the Site, 2004
Running Time: 1:34 mins
Michael Gambill – Gallup New Mexico

On the summer solstice of 2004, I concluded the Entropic Reversal Project, which began in February 2004. The project included clearing all the debris out of an abandoned, crumbling house in Yatahey, New Mexico, which boarders the Navajo Indian Reservation. By replacing close to 1000 cubic feet of soil and burned roofing material with fill dirt and compost, I was able to grow and sustain a species of flower native to Arizona and New Mexico.

The piece was about creating an equilibrium between the crumbling walls, the tragedy of a collapsing roof and the growth of new life in the space. I felt the need to create an almost anonymous gift or offering to the structure, to perhaps ease the weighty feeling of suffering that is embedded into the site.

During the five month project, I collected video and created “Clearing the Site”, which is a testament to the process and serves as part of the only documentation of the entire project.

Musical Chairs, 2004 (filmed in Israel)
Running Time: 2:12 mins
Lilianne Milgrom – Fairfax Virginia

Chairs have always held a fascination for me – from their functionality, beauty and intrinsic human qualities. Throughout the ages, the “seat” has symbolically represented power and social standing. Today, the chair is no less a symbol of undeniable power, if somewhat more subtly disguised. In this video work, I am exploring the chair as metaphor, taking as my launching point the universally recognized children’s game of musical chairs.

My memories of playing musical chairs as a child are still tinged with feelings of anxiety, desperation and humiliation. I know from questioning many others, that I am not alone in harboring these sorts of memories. The competitive and often aggressive behaviors released during the game have long been a source of educational and psychological research. It is no surprise that the BBC reported in 2003 that “the traditional children’s party game of musical chairs has been accused of breeding violence. A booklet, launched by the British Education Minister, says that nursery schools should consider playing a less aggressively competitive game…” The upbeat, lighthearted tunes cannot mask the true purpose of the game – to win at the expense of others.

The implications of musical chairs can easily be superimposed upon the struggles in our lifelong journey to grab that one special chair which will be ours to occupy for life. We may strive to sit in multiple chairs – chairs of power, wealth, security, marriage, etc. These places must often be fought over; we pay a high emotional price for attaining our very own chair, often by stepping on weaker contenders and knocking aside our competitors.

There are, however, those within our society whom the game defeats completely. Musical chairs is a game of absolutes – you either win the chair or you do not. There is only one irrefutable winner. Just as there are some who are crushed and defeated in the struggle to find their place in the world, the majority of the world’s population cannot even aspire to have the chance to play – they have very few if any, prospects of even entering the game. Survival is the only game they are playing.

Within the context of our society, we have all experienced setbacks and disappointments, watching as others take possession of that coveted chair. It is not hard to identify with ‘Xander’ who laments on an internet dating site : “Do you ever feel that the world is a giant game of musical chairs and the music’s stopped and you’re the only one who doesn’t have a chair?”

www.liliannemilgrom.com

Meditation VII: Anxiety, 2004
Running Time: 3:14 mins
Vonda Yarberry – Springfield Missouri

Meditation VII: Anxiety is an experimental 3-D computer animation which explores anxiety of the everyday. Juxtaposing ordinary and some not-so-ordinary objects in surreal environments, with a disturbing soundtrack, viewers are beckoned to analyze and draw inferences from the evocative imagery: houses made of matches and microfiche, jars of water, tornados, scissors, thread, magnifying glasses and boxes full of memories.

Focus, 2007
Running Time: 2:06 mins
Jenna Caschera – Kalamazoo Michigan

“We should consider the arguments of the feminists with no less suspicion, however, for very often their controversial aim deprives them of all real value. If the ‘woman question’ seems trivial, it is because masculine arrogance has made of it a ‘quarrel’; and when quarreling one no longer reasons well. People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior, or equal to man…Each argument at once suggests its opposite, and both are fallacious. If we are to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh.” (Simone de Beauvoir)

A woman’s awareness of her body and self is crucial for gaining an understanding of how she is placed as the “other” in a man’s world. She will be judged and often discredited. A woman often reflects upon herself in the masculine persona, asking herself how a man would perceive her, while still regarding judgments from other females. When she offers herself to be gazed at by men and women, she places herself in vulnerable state. Not only does she become self-critical, her ability to focus on her contribution to becoming self-aware begins to diminish; feminine vanity takes over.

www.jennacaschera.com

Synapse, 2007
Running Time: 2:00 mins
Matthew Garrison – Downingtown Pennsylvania

Synapse takes its name from the synapses in the brain where electrical activity (information) is transferred from one cell to another. Synapse acknowledges an inseparable, organic connection between energy and information. It also relates the transference of information in the brain to the spread of information between people. Synapse portrays a couple’s memories and feelings as digitally fragmented electrical activity, sporadically disrupted by static.

www.garrisonarts.com

Danse Surreal, 2007
Running Time: 3:13 mins
Lucinda Luvaas – Hemet California

“Danse Surreal,” is part of a group of video shorts that deal with natural imagery as it contrasts with urban environments and sound. In this short, I pay homage to Rene Magritte, who captured the essence of the oneric.

In addition, I’ve always been deeply affected by the fact that we can’t stop time. It passes by us and moves on without our being able to control it. Movement which to me can represent time is a vital component and in this film the swirling movement depicts time as it passes, as we grow and diminish– transforming ourselves from one thing to another.

I compose all my own audio and the sound is vital to these pieces because they are more about ambience and mood then about traditional narrative.

I see this suite of works as a sort of visual symphony or poem. Each piece, altho’ separate, will have a connection in terms of subject matter and mood, to the whole.

Hardware Used: Canon XL2, Nikon Digital Still Camera, Imac, and Power Mac G4
Software Used: Final Cut Pro, Motion, Digital Performer, Sound Track Pro, Commotion Pro and Adobe Photoshop.

Lucinda Luvaas, 2007

www.lucindaluvaas.com

Re-remembered; video palimpsests #1, 2007
Running Time: 3:09 mins
Brian DeLevie – Denver Colorado

Re-remembered; video palimpsests #1 is a visual exploration of recorded history and subjective memory. Using the palimpsest as a model for this exploration, each layering of imagery and video represents mixed memory, a merging of historical and personal perspectives whose partial erasure and rediscovery recedes and remerges within a media-saturated environment.

Each day, an array of meaningful and arbitrary images are constructed and deconstructed within our minds and all around us. These works act to question the stability of what we call history and memory, what is remembered and re-remembered, fleeting and enduring, troubling and endearing, written and re-written.

The original material manipulated in each piece is a combination of historical and personal footage and photographs. Digital artifacts and effects represent time, obstacles and our inability to erase what has taken place. The overall landscape of re-remembrances depicts our ability to re-present ourselves and the world with our notion of what is actual.

www.briandelevie.com

The Isthmus of Kansas, 2007
1:13 exceprt, Full Running Time: 8:06 mins
Christopher Cassidy – Greensboro North Carolina

The Isthmus of Kansas is a video completed in the spring of 2007. In this short work, I have striven for a simple formal clarity, while continuing to pursue my interest in landscape, geography and the viewer’s point-of-view. Original footage taken from locations high above the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines is combined in one nearly symmetrical image. It was the idea of the cross-continental call and response of the white lines of breaking surf that originally inspired me to create this work, which I think of as existing in a gallery space almost like an animated formalist painting, lines and shapes constantly shifting to redefine the simple geometry of the image. In this work, my strong desire is to create an impossible vision that unites these two simultaneous natural events, the contact between oceans and land separated by 2500 miles of intervening country. I was aware from an early stage that there were darker readings to the video, with its visualization of an American landmass reduced by rising sea levels to a bare strip of sand, and this allusion led me to the title.

www.chrismcassidy.com

see video

Inside the Outside, 2006
Dancer Inside: Klaudia Ahrer
Sound by Cherry Sunkist: People don’t belong to people,
What I want/Why do I even ask
Running Time: 5:32 mins
Evelin Stermitz – Austria/Slovenia

Moving beyond a surface, an outside, a window into a different world – what are the reasons for moving within a certain space of femininity? The questions of the moving shape circulate around the other, the captured difference, the identity and the self. By acting as a body with its language, this remains from the self and questioning shape. The body as a shape for self-reflective questions within a female room seemingly protected against the outside but exposed to the gaze.

http://es.mur.at

Rebuilt, 2007
Running Time: 2:04 mins
Karie Kuiper – Kalamazoo Michigan

Our natural environment is polluted everyday through agriculture, industry, automobiles and deforestation. This video addresses the destructiveness with which humans treat our natural environment as well as the way in which humans attempt to re-create nature artificially. The final man-made product looks similar to the original flower; but upon taking a closer look, we see the obvious differences between the uniqueness of true nature and our synthetic materials. The artificial flower will never grow, never die and never live; however, it is assembled in the pot of soil as the original true flower once had lived.

Gevurah, 2002
Running Time: 1:23 mins
Jacek J. Kolasinski – Miami Florida

The looping sequence of bomber planes scaring the celestial firmament symbolizes a total distraction, a reoccurring pattern in human history. Gevurah or “strength” is usually understood as God’s mode of punishing the wicked and judging humanity in general.

www.jacekjkolasinski.com