William Roper (Altadena, CA)
Pigs, Pigs, Oh! Those Tasty Pigs
2020

This film is a collaborative realization of Rope'r’s composition, Pigs, Pigs Oh! Those Tasty Pigs, with Southland Ensemble (a Los Angeles-based contemporary music ensemble). It was created in September of 2020, when government mandates banned people from gathering indoors: a time of social distance. For this realization of Pigs..., the ensemble explored how video mediation could close the gaps of time and space between performers who couldn’t be in the same room together at the same time. Through this exploration, they created an impossible closeness where the performers move in between, around, and even through one another.

The piece was created by filming each performer’s portion of Pigs... alone, without them having any knowledge of the performances that came before or after them. These individual performances were then overlaid to create a composite rendition of the full piece wherein all of the uncanny alignments and coordinations are simply a coincidence, a closeness governed by chance. However, it is always apparent that the closeness is an illusion, leaving a small, impossible to fill gap—an interstice—where it is possible to explore the tension between making music together and perceived togetherness. 

Enrico Dedin (Musile di Piave, Italy)
The Photo Hunters
2019

The sense of wonder generated by the grandeur of the Atlantic Ocean and the sighting of cetaceans is overwhelmed by the obsession to take photos. We don’t observe anymore, we only photograph.

An excursion off the coast of Tenerife, potentially contemplative, spiritual and magical experience becomes instead an anxious photographic hunt that makes evident both the alienation of mass tourism and the incommunicability between contemporary man and wild nature. The animals themselves, who were protagonists in mythology and symbolism, now become mere images to be consumed instantly on the web. It is always easier to connect to the network, but increasingly difficult to connect to the world around us. Maybe it's not a coincidence if in English ‘to shoot’ means to shoot with a gun, but also to take a photograph or a film.

“Pointing a camera is like pointing a rifle, and every time I pointed it, it felt like life was drying up from things.”
—from the film Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders

Dasha + Zhanar (Kyiv, Ukraine / Moscow, Russia)
Unlock Performances #2
2019

Dasha+Zhanar is a collaboration of two artists from Kyiv and Moscow started in 2019. For a long time, the artists did not see each other face to face and did not speak. Communication between two artists is based on filling interstices with collaborative work: video, installations, objects and performances.

At the beginning of the project Dasha and Zhanar created a folder in Dropbox. They shared videos, photographs and sounds from their everyday life. When they started to shoot performances, the collaboration flow changed from digital to physical.

Unlock is a series of four performances shot in Kyiv. Zhanar comes from Moscow to not-meet Dasha, but to perform with her. They explore different aspects of interaction from non-verbal to bodily. Performances naturally unlock different ways of communication (voice, touch). The fourth performance breaks the last wall, and they finally see each other face to face.

In Unlock Performances #2, most of the communication is direct—via crying out loud the names from distance or involving bodily interaction. Artists play badminton with a black cloth between them. They learn to trust each other—Dasha blindly falls in Zhanar’s arms. They help the trees hug, and thus hug each other. They also measure objectively the same distance with their own steps—the same procedure yet different outcome. Finally, the artists meet in the underground with quite an evident hit.

Trina Michelle Robinson (San Francisco, CA)
Berea
2021

Trina Michelle Robinson is an artist exploring the relationship between memory and migration through film, archival materials and text.

“In a years-long effort to connect to my ancestors after discovering my maternal family roots in Kentucky, Berea is a meditation on mining the past and trying to read between the lines. The video essay highlights a desperation to excavate the lost memories of my family’s history, including my great-great grandfather's years studying at Berea College shortly after the Civil War. The also piece contains archival film footage and audio that are used as an entry point into exploring fractured memories and the attempt to unearth them. These include Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film Within Our Gates, Learning to Live, a promotional film from 1937 at a time when the school was segregated due to a 1904 law in Kentucky that forced the segregation of schools and audio of an interview with anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.”

Kate Stone (Brooklyn, NY)
The Night Side
2019
stop motion animation

The Night Side takes place in two adjacent rooms that appear haunted by natural and invisible forces. Curtains flap in the wind, an old tabloid blows across the room, somewhere a radio turns on, and time slips. Electricity crackles and travels through the walls, playing tricks with light and shadow. Historically, stories of ghosts and haunted houses arise in response to political and social conflict. Here, paranormal tropes are used as a stand-in for the anxiety that current world events bring into our personal lives and private spaces.

Kate Stone's stop-motion animations use collage techniques and miniature sets to blur the line between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, creating distorted domestic interiors and liminal worlds that exist somewhere between interior and exterior and between reality and superstition. The animations explore the domestic uncanny and the narratives embedded in everyday architectural structures. The uninhabited rooms are psychological spaces - the fuzzy architecture of dreams or memories - that are often in the midst of transformation, being overtaken by natural, supernatural or invisible forces. They contain everyday objects in awkward arrangements, weaving narratives about time and place, memory and mythology, fact and fiction.

Mariah Anne Johnson (Los Angeles, CA)
7 Habitat Actions
2020

7 Habitat Actions is a video documentation of site-specific actions made in response to the artist’s home and California’s Safer at Home order during the COVID-19 pandemic. to the COVID-19 Stay-at-home orders.

”Since 2014 my practice has transformed from materially-intense, painterly installations in interior spaces to an open ended process in which my body is my primary tool for examining a landscape. Combining the observational focus of drawing with the site sensitivity of installation, I create movement works and works on paper that describe my intuitive understanding of a place, be it a wild mountainside, an urban sidewalk, or my own backyard. Moving and drawing have become the pillars that support my practice. These activities are modes of physical research, similar processes that utilize different parts of myself. Both involve careful looking and mental presence, both are physically active and accumulate over time. One describes space, while the other cuts through it. Each builds a body of knowledge, in the body. In this time of climate change, as our species faces the ramifications of our way of being, it feels essential to engage in this physical, deeply felt examination of my surroundings.

I bear witness to what we have before us. I watch it change and grow and give way over time.”

Mateo Vargas (Mexico City, Mexico)
Una Separación (A Separation)
2019

Vargas’s video work "A Separation" on its surface examines light filtering through the interstices of blinds on a window as it travels across the wall of an empty room. Temporally the video transpires in a brief instant, a fleeting moment that seems to draw out longer and longer the more one watches and hears the audio. The voices are those of children trapped between the interstices of countries and societies that reject their basic humanity and agency. Neither here nor there, they are packed into camps out of sight and out of mind, cruelly cut out and left to fall between the cracks. 

Leslie Anne Condon (Georgetown, MA)
An Homage to the Asian Women In My Life 1981 - 2000

While growing up as an Asian adoptee in a white family in a small New England town, I had very little exposure to Asian and Asian American culture in my daily life. Through often difficult interactions, I slowly learned about the stigmas and stereotypes that Asian communities are subject to, and it wasn't until later in life that I observed more complex iterations of Asian culture. Born out of a desire to see a face like my own reflected back at me, I turned to the television shows, books, magazines, and movies of the time for examples of racial identity, especially representations of Asian femininity, however limited in mainstream media. The few female Asian iconic figures of my youth still introduced me to new possibilities; I could suddenly see myself as a journalist, an artist, a pro athlete, or as an actor, and potentially the characters they played. 

An Homage to the Asian Women in My Life 1981 - 2000 reflects my past struggle to connect with my female Asianness. During the video performance, I temporarily mirror the visual form of the eight most iconic Asian women from my youth, at once trying to replicate and merge into their image. The pantomime continuously shifts between the uncanny, bizarre, and hypnotic, sometimes failing altogether. My performance honors these women while also dubiously suggesting that their aura and talent can somehow be appropriated by simply embodying their physical likeness. Through this gesture, I am recalling my deep yearning for Asian representation and also hinting at the ways we can lose ourselves through emulation, especially when the public image of that person has been distorted and flattened by cultural hegemony.

Darryl Lauster (Arlington, Texas)
Affirmation
2017

“I am an artist for whom American history is a central influence and conceptual core.  In broad terms my work investigates and appropriates the American historical record and aspects of our national identity as frequently defined and documented by vernacular art, folklore, foundational narratives and more recently, through individual biographies.  Many of these platforms, whether accurate or not, deeply affect our present situation.

My work in video, including Affirmation, isolates my own voice and image as the target from which to explore personal questions of identity, family and community, as well as public conceptions of heroism, activism and patriotism.  I am making myself vulnerable to both the viewer’s eye and to his/her convictions regarding issues that I narrate from a first-person viewpoint. At some point, it is my hope that the viewer substitutes their thoughts for my own.”

Moshopefoluwa Olagunju (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
Behind the Steal
2021

Behind The Steal is a two-channel video. The video on the right is Kendrick Lamar's 2015 music video, “These Walls.” The video on the left is Olagunju’s edit of found footage from the January 6️, 2021 insurrection sourced from media reports and people who documented their activities.

Carson Lynn (Camarillo, CA)
Oddball
2019
Machinima Film

Oddball is a short machinima film with all footage taken directly from Halo 2, with the help of the Project Cartographer mod. All text is appropriated from real conversations between players in various Halo games, taken from YouTube videos uploaded between 2006 - 2010.

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 On May 6th, 2015, queer games critic Aevee Bee penned a personal essay titled “I love my untouchable virtual body”. In the text, she talks about the dodge mechanic in the action role-playing game Bloodborne, which negates all harm dealt to the player during an incredibly brief window of time. Bee wishes that this evade was a superpower she possessed: “that if you could fit every moment of pain in that one tenth of a second you could be invincible for the rest of your life.”

But your character in Halo 2 is not meant to directly avoid damage like this. Halo’s virtual bodies are meant to be used, mangled, and riddled with bullet holes. Corpses are strewn across battlefields to show where danger resides. In the Oddball gametype, skulls are objectives and props that are handled like bowling balls and not like the remains of a human being. The only way to heal wounds is to find cover and wait: to slink away and hide from the violent world. 

In 2004, Halo 2 was the first game I played online with a public voice chat, and with that my first encounters with homophobic language. These outbursts, most often due to rage, always centered around the body: physical harm, rape, and death. My real body was never in peril, but my developing queer self was under attack through the internalization of this homophobia. This queer self had to heal, and the only way was to find cover and wait.