Video Slam Artists (2010)

Damali Abrams

Walking with Linda Montano, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 03’49”

damali abrams is a Guyanese-American video-performance artist who lives and works in New York City. She received her BA at New York University and her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. A 2009-10 A.I.R. fellowship recipient, abrams is currently working on a fictional television network, Self-Help TV. In the ongoing video-performance project, she uses her own body and personal history as a point of departure. Self-Help TV employs a range of televisual formats, including comedy, drama, and reality to examine issues of self-improvement. It has been viewed in New York, Philadelphia, Vermont, New Mexico, and Miami. Mainstream self-help tends to ignore how factors such as race, class, and gender might affect one’s overall well-being. As a woman of color, abrams gives visibility to people who are rarely represented. In Walking with Linda Montano, abrams walks with Linda Montano, a seminal performance artist, and exchanges various ideas about art and life.

Nobutaka Aozaki

Mouse, 2008, single-channel, color, sound, 04’49”

In Beat Down, a boxing nun puppet controlled by the artist punches the artist continuously in the face. The puppet is self-punishing as well as a representative of the outside world. The artist’s reaction to the punches is one of indifference—a numbness related to the repetition of being beaten. The video references Catholicism’s tradition of self-punishment, guilty consciousness, and the religious definition of sin. The sound effects are from Bruce Lee’s classic kung-fu movie Enter the Dragon.

Chris Bors (b. Ithaca, NY) lives and works in Harlem, New York City. He received his MFA from School of Visual Arts and studied at Rhode Island School of Design. He employs a variety of media, including video, painting, and photography. His art is both autobiographical and appropriates imagery found in popular culture, virtual spaces, and hardcore punk and metal music. He explores the dysfunctional and schizophrenic identity that results from a contemporary culture preoccupied by TV and video games, as well as the specific instances of this mass-media culture such as the hyperbolic acting of professional wrestling. His art has been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, Envoy Enterprises, Heist Gallery, Sixtyseven, and Ten in One Gallery in New York; Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg; Bahnwärterhaus in Esslingen, Germany; Bongout in Berlin; and at the Videoex Festival in Zurich. His work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Vogue Italia, Time Out New York, Artnet.com, K48, zingmagazine and Old News.

Chris Bors

Beat Down, 1998, single-channel, color, sound, 02’50”

In Beat Down, a boxing nun puppet controlled by the artist punches the artist continuously in the face. The puppet is self-punishing as well as a representative of the outside world. The artist’s reaction to the punches is one of indifference—a numbness related to the repetition of being beaten. The video references Catholicism’s tradition of self-punishment, guilty consciousness, and the religious definition of sin. The sound effects are from Bruce Lee’s classic kung-fu movie Enter the Dragon.

Chris Bors (b. Ithaca, NY) lives and works in Harlem, New York City. He received his MFA from School of Visual Arts and studied at Rhode Island School of Design. He employs a variety of media, including video, painting, and photography. His art is both autobiographical and appropriates imagery found in popular culture, virtual spaces, and hardcore punk and metal music. He explores the dysfunctional and schizophrenic identity that results from a contemporary culture preoccupied by TV and video games, as well as the specific instances of this mass-media culture such as the hyperbolic acting of professional wrestling. His art has been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, Envoy Enterprises, Heist Gallery, Sixtyseven, and Ten in One Gallery in New York; Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg; Bahnwärterhaus in Esslingen, Germany; Bongout in Berlin; and at the Videoex Festival in Zurich. His work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Vogue Italia, Time Out New York, Artnet.com, K48, zingmagazine and Old News.

Tsz Man Chan

The Circle– Railway Roundhouse, Berlin, 5 – 6 June 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 04’44”

The Circle– Railway Roundhouse, Berlin, 5 – 6 June 2009 is a collaboration with artist
Ivanov and composer James Hesford. During a 24-hour, non-stop working session, a
new circle was created as a painting and a musical composition.

Artist’s Statement: The Circle was suspended in the middle of the Roundhouse with 12 tuned up nylon strings attached to the top gallery supported by 24 columns. The space was like a dream and the working process was like being in a dream. A stage for an opera. Unreal. High. Around. Black and white on color photographs rendered by dust and abandonment. Big silent space with only sounds of passing-by trains and airplanes flying over. Enclosed into the circle for 24 hours, into the red bath of paint and shouting into the dome high above. Light was moving and painting was moving with it. Night was dark and cold and for the first time painting was built in the dark as after many hours inside the circle it wasn’t important to see but to move and to wait for the sun to rise and after move again in a day light. From inside the circle, only the dome high above could be seen with crosses of steel structure and graffiti on the broken glass of the skylight. Trains and planes and silence at night and birds in the morning and trains and planes again and red enclosure growing around perhaps affected by changes of sounds and its rhythms. Red started as a revolt against the dust and abandonment, but later the process fixed on graffiti, steel structure and sunlight movement. Music by James Hesford: The Berlin Composition was based on the event The Circle, which took place in June 2009 in an abandoned railway roundhouse in East Berlin.

Tsz Man Chan was born in Hong Kong and belongs to the last generation of British colonial education in Hong Kong. After formal and informal fine art training, the artist had actively exhibited in Hong Kong, Macau and cities of China as a lead member of Hong Kong non-profit art organization Project 226, which passionately promoted art through exhibitions, performances, and artist exchange programs in Hong Kong and China. The intensive period of work evoked the further education to improve the art management skills. Gradually she moved from Hong Kong to London. Her artwork was developing in London while she was finishing the Master degree in Art Management. Currently, besides making art, she is working on a project LAND ART papa westray in Papa Westray – one of the most remote island of Orkney Archipelago, Scotland.

Jay Critchley

Global Yawning for a Small Planet, 2008, single-channel, color, sound, 03’00”

Yawning increases alertness, reduces stress, and enhances personal, community and planetary health. We yawn to cool the brain; we act to cool the Earth. The personal is planetary. What is our “exhausted” planet telling us? Jay Chritchley’s humorous video Global Yawning for a Small Planet portrays people yawning. The human face—its beauty, character, personality, form, color—has intrigued artists for millennia; these artists have captured its moods and distinguished its features. Yet yawning has received scant attention and examination. It is an essential human activity that crosses cultural and geographic borders, and can be liberating, re-energizing and therapeutic. Additionally, the video critiques current attempts to address global warming. It suggests that mainstream environmental organizations (Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife federation, etc) have become mouthpieces for the corporate “green” agendas, giving citizens a false sense that they are doing their part by supporting them. They have actually diluted and sabotaged the radical actions necessary to confront climate change. They have received large amounts of money and have actually opposed more dramatic action, instead playing the Congressional lobby game. Global Yawning was initiated at the Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery in February 2008, with participants from Provincetown, Boston, Rhode Island, New York City and Washington, DC. Global Yawning was finished and featured at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ Encuentro in Bogota, Columbia in 2009.

Jay Critchley is based in Provincetown. His visual, conceptual and performance work and environmental activism have traversed the globe, including Japan, Holland, Germany, England, Argentina and Columbia. He founded Theater in the Ground in his backyard septic tank, and the patriotic Old Glory Condoms. He won an HBO award for Toilet Treatments, and produced a CD, Big Twig Tunnel Tapes – Boston’s Big Dig Sings, recorded 125 feet below Boston. He has had residencies at Harvard University, AS220 in Rhode Island, and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in New York. He received a Special Citation form the Boston Society of Architects for Martucket Eyeland Resort & Theme Park.

Robert Ladislas Derr

Ideology, 2000, single-channel, color, sound, 09’00”

Ideology recontextualizes the modernist myth of the heroic artist’s masculinity. The artist has taken Jackson Pollocks’s actions and angst, and incorporated them utilizing the “Pollockian Performative” to subvert the process of action painting and the myths surrounding it. The video documents Derr being assaulted by white paint balls. While the artist, painted in red, stands still against a wall, bearing white paint balls thrown to his face, the popped white balls spread white color on his face and the wall. The video concludes when the whole scene turns into white. It takes performance beyond the elementary existential exercise, à Pollock, to expand upon the act of painting and the act of making art.

Robert Ladislas Derr has exhibited and performed worldwide at such venues as the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, LIVE Performance Art Biennale, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, Athens Video Art Festival, Athens, Greece, Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA, American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy, Irish Film Institute, Dublin, Ireland, and Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn, NY, to name a few. It can be said that he puts himself literally in the center of a barrage of questions about life and making art. Derr received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Murray Dwertman

Waterfall Capture, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 04’48”

Waterfall Capture starts with a small waterfall—one that could easily go unnoticed. A Nylon bag is used as a water-capturing device and installed across the waterfall. The insignificant waterfall is the genesis of a struggle, an encounter, or a sort of happening. Uncontrollable elements play an unexpected role, breathing character into the waterfall and creating tension around an unknown result.
Dwertman’s work entails venturing into America’s backwoods and using what is available at a chosen site along with some basic materials, tools, or props. He then documents the process, action, and resulting interventions. Waterfall Capture is one of several site-specific outdoor installations and videos that playfully evoke deep-rooted attractions and primal engagements with the natural landscape, conceived of and approached as both a physical resource and an actively kinetic force. Pitted against notions of estrangement in a struggle for relationship, the artist plays as both performer and engineer engaging the subject and re-imagining roles, power, and the character of thing itself.

Murray Dwertman received an MFA from Pratt Institute and BA from the University of Kentucky. He lives and works in Brooklyn, and spends much time for working on projects and installations in the mountains of the northeast. His work has been exhibited at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY; New York Center For Arts and Media Studies, NY; Behringer- Crawford Museum, KY; Denise Bibro Platform, NY; Tower 49, NY; and the ISE Cultural Foundation, NY; the Downtown Arts Center, Lexington, KY; and in Escape From New York at Fabricolor Building, Patterson, NJ.

Willum Geerts

Sorry[Speech], 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 09’43”

Willum Geerts’ multidisciplinary art is based on the absurdity, chaos and tragedy of our everyday life. Today’s excessive and superficial consumer culture sets certain conventions, clichés, and rules that impact our behavior and identity. The artist sees that our materialistic and affluent entertainment culture produces alienation among individuals. In his opinion we are all lonesome. By using the artistic approaches of remix and postproduction, Greets creates often humorous and ironic videos, aiming to capture structural distortion and absurdity of our consumer society and life. In the video Sorry [Speech] , Geerts excerpts segments in which the former US president George W. Bush says “sorry” in his Farewell Address to the Nation in January 2009.

Sharing his creative time between Amsterdam and New York, Dutch multidisciplinary artist Willum Geerts exhibits and performs his art in The Netherlands and around the world on a regular basis. After his graduation in Fine Arts (painting) from Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht in 1996, he has worked in the field of film and video, such as Dutch National Television. Geerts also has worked in theatre as a performer and a musician with his politically engaged absurdist music collective Salonpunk Orchestra “Human Alert,” producing albums and touring Europe and the U.S. (SXSW), amongst other musical projects. He has received several grants from the Dutch Art Foundation and curated performances festivals for the Van Abbemuseum. He participated in Art Omi International Artist’s Residency and will participate in the LMCC residency in 2010.

Kanene Holder

BKWT/Alice In Negroland Nightmare, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 02’00”

Intended to promote and facilitates dialogues and an exchange of ideas, Kanene Holder’s video deals with the incredible fact of racial discrimination still going on in the US in the 21st Century. In her video, Holder produces characters who are minorities, who process their internal conflicts and impediments in order to solve stereotypical ghetto-ism and redefine the reality once for all. Referencing her high-school experience (from 1993 to 1997), Holder criticizes the lies of media and the political status quo, and encourages the audience to overcome the societal injustices through self-determination. Fast flashing the stereotypical images for Black people—such as watermelon, KoolAid packets, Aunt Jemmimah, and Born In the USA flags—Holder is able to capture the emotionally frenzied state and the internal pain of what Jean Paul Sartre has termed “uneasy consciousness caught up in its own contradictions.”

Kanene Holder is a Howard University alumna and holds a City College MsEd in Childhood Education. She is a recipient of 2007 Franklin Furnace Performance Art Fund, 2007 Urban Arts Initiative, and 2006 LMCC Grant. As a writer/actress, she is most noted for SITCHAASSDOWN, her one-woman theatrical experiment, which she calls “Shock and Awe with an Intellectual Aftertaste” due to its amalgamation of farce and sociopolitical truth, at Dixon Place for the NY International Fringe Festival 2005, The Schomburg, The African Burial Ground, Symphony Space and the Abrons Art Center as well as The Gatehouse at Harlem Stage. Active in the community, Holder is the Outreach Coordinator for the Hip Hop Odyssey Film Festival and currently teaches acting at Harlem Children Zone.

Andrea Juan

Methane, 2006, single-channel, color, sound, 08’50”

Methane is a part of a large work of projections, installations, and performances titled Antarctica Project, 2004–2008 that took place in Antarctica over four expeditions. The broader project entailed taking art to Antarctica and developing short-lived site-specific installations that serve as positive examples of peaceful co-presence with the existing environment. Once the exhibition came to an end, the biosphere was left just as it had been found. The only trace/work that remained was a series of video and photographic records with the recollections of the inhabitants, of which Methane is one. In particular, Methane explores the effects of climate change on the Antarctic Peninsula and was based upon the research of scientists from the Dirección Nacional del Antártico regarding the presence of methane gas and the disappearance of the Larsen Ice Shelf.

Andrea Juan works with photography, video and installations. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship, Canadian Research Grant and UNESCO Award among others. Her latest solo exhibitions were at Chelsea Art Museum, New York; Candiani Center, Venice, Italy; Greenburger Collection, New York; Tigre Art Museum, Buenos Aires; RAM Foundation, Rotterdam, Holland; Museum of Latin American Art, Buenos Aires; University of West of England, Bristol, UK; Vauxhall Centre, London; U.K.; Juttner Gallery, Vienna, Austria and Presse Papier Centre, Quebec, Canada. Publications include Polar South (2006), Antarctica Project (2006), and Getting Over (2004). Since 1990 she has exhibited extensively worldwide at venues including Ear to the Earth Festival, New York; the 2nd Moscow Biennale; the London Royal Academy, UK; the National Art Gallery of Seoul; and the International Biennial Rotterdam.

Dana Kash

The space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 5’10”

Dana Kash is interested in using the material properties of video to compress and expand time and space. The space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now, a title drawn from White Noise, is structured by splicing together short clips from her cell phone in an attempt to create experiences running parallel to each other, at the same time and in the same space as one another. Much of the footage is recorded in real time and in real spaces. However by flashing, rewinding, fast forwarding, pausing and stopping the images, the video exaggerates the spaces and constructs a location that only emerges from sliced and spliced time, providing a corporeal experience of strained feeling – strained in both senses of being tense and being run through a sieve.

Dana Kash is a multimedia artist working in Brooklyn. She is interested in distorted spatial perceptions, in real space and video space. Current works in progress include collaborative video and sculpture installations constructed out of as many TVs as possible. She received her BFA in painting from Cornell University in 2009.

Jae Kyung Kim

Sequences, 2010, single-channel, color, silent, 02’08”

Jae Kyung Kim’s video, Sequences is a statement about the action of painting on walls. Kim documented through photographs the progress of painting on a large canvas, and re-arranged the photos so that viewers can experience her process of painting. Spontaneous brush movements are captured. Moments of erasing paints and dripping water show how she builds images in her painting. These images are colorful, moving, and rigorous. They are also combined with figures and abstractions. What finally results on a canvas is neither an actual thing nor a person. Every form is all mixed and melted together and becomes an abstract image of her painting.

Jae Kyung Kim is an interdisciplinary artist exploring various mediums including painting, drawing, performances, and installation. Kim was born in Korea and raised in Korea/China and came to the United States in 2004. She holds a BFA degree from Parsons The New School for Design and received Deans award and BFA scholarship during her study. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Mayumi Komuro

Lesson 0, 2008, single-channel, color, sound, 04’07”

Mayumi Komuro (b. Gunma, Japan) grew up mostly in Tokyo, lived in Aomori, Japan, and Düsseldorf, Germany, and moved to New York in 2002. She received BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from Queens College. Working mostly video and installation, Mayumi has been showing her artwork in various galleries, events, as well as film festivals, such as Appalachian film festival and Migr@tion film festival. She received 2007 MFA grants from Joan Mitchell Foundation, and her piece was included in the grant recipients’ group show at Cue Foundation in 2008. Mayumi currently lives and works in NY.

Using video and installation, Komuro’s projects have been mysteriously suggestive but always accessible. Most of her projects are initiated in situations with which she can identify, but how they turn out are not exactly the same as what they were in the reality. No matter how far away imagination goes from the reality, as long as it does not lose the sense of the “real” for the artist, metaphysically or metaphorically, the viewer could find the artist’s inner view. Just like all the fictions and fantasies are reflections of our fear and desire, her works mirror her state of mind at the time.

For Jamaica Flux 2010, Komuro contributes a short video Lesson 0. It is about following one’s desire and taking risk—not a small one but life-or-death size risk. Mysteriously open-ended, Lesson 0 might be shocking but strangely humorous. Humor is a core element of her work, because it is easy to share, and it is universal. Mark Twain once said, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.” Real humor could come from something not cheerful but rather negative, and it is a humor that saves us from unbearable situations and keeps us going forward. Humor has this irresistible power to break into tragedy and turn it to comedy. Komuro finds it quite lively and fascinating. Through her work, she creates the confused moment of falling apart and leaves the judgment to the viewers.

Ellen Lake

Let’s Not Keep Score, 2008, single-channel, color, sound,01’00”

I look forward to it and Let’s not keep score are part of a project Call + Response, a series of shorts combining 16mm home movies from the 1930s and 1940s with cell phone and digital video from today. The actions spotlighted in the two shorts (talking on the phone and playing tennis) are a springboard into a larger exploration about time, technology, and memory. When the artist discovered 16mm home movies in her grandmother’s closet, she digitized 21 reels of the films for her project. Created with no thought of an audience beyond the living room, the films maintained their sense of intimacy and offer evocative images of life seventy years ago. Contrary to the stereotype of the faded, scratched, and shaky home movie, the films were carefully shot often with lush, vibrant color. By juxtaposing these old films (the past) with the recent videos she created (the present), Lake investigates ideas about personal diary, collective memory, nostalgia, preservation, and the place where private and public experiences converge. With the everwidening range of technological media available today, the project plays with ideas about time, place, the evolution of media, and history.

Ellen Lake (b. 1969, Falls Church, VA) earned her MFA from Mills College, Oakland, CA, in 2002. Among her awards and grants are: Sarah Jacobson Film Grant (2009), Best Documentary DiGit Media Exposition (2007), Murphy & Cadogan Award (2001), and a grant from the San Francisco Foundation.
Her works have been presented in The Big Switch: New Media, Film & Video at Sumter County Gallery of Art, Sumter, SC (2009); Subversive Complicity at The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2008); Love/War/Sex at Exit Art, New York, NY (2007) among other exhibitions. Her video was screened at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art & Science, Fresno, CA (2009); Rotterdam VHS Festival, Chicago, Il (2009); Walker Art center, Minneapolis, MN (2008) and other venues.

Sujin Lee

Fast, 2007, single-channel, b/w, silent, 04’39”

Having experienced learning English as a second language, Sujin Lee is interested in the physical act of speaking sign language, translating spoken text into written text, and vice versa. She also is interested in the gaps—the time lapse and the gaps of signifiers between images and texts—that occur during a simultaneous translation of spoken language into a sign language. The artist combines text, video, and performance to discuss how we use language to negotiate, appropriate and interpret different cultures. Her work is especially concerned with the elements that spoken words hold, such as accents, durations, emotions, hesitations and mistakes—lingual aspects that are not easily translated into written forms. She frequently uses dubbing or subtitles, and juxtaposes a spoken text with a written text to explore the notion of “perfect” speech, the faithfulness of voice to the image, and the ownership of language. Departing from the perspective that language is a politically and culturally charged space, the artist attempts to capture struggles, violence and understandings that occur in that particular space between individuals, parties, and countries.

The video Fast explores the act of reading and speaking in relation to time. In Fast, a woman signs the verb “fast” in American Sign Language (by putting her thumb and index finger together and “zipping” her mouth, which resembles the action of closing one’s mouth to be silent). The speed of the action is slowed down, allowing the sign’s meaning might possibly change, to reveal the complexity of performing language through different cultural and linguistic systems.

Sujin Lee is an interdisciplinary artist who currently works in a combination of text, video and performance to discuss how we use language to negotiate, appropriate, and interpret different cultures. Lee holds an MFA in Fine Arts from New York University, 2003, and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, 2005. She has exhibited and performed her work nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the 2008 Artist in the Marketplace fellowship from the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the 2007 Emerge fellowship from Aljira, and most recently, artist residency at the Millay Colony of the Arts.

Jeannette Louie

Disco, 2009, single-channel, 4:3 ratio, color, sound, 02’49”; music by Seth Simon

Scientific author Simon Ings has written that “humans are not machines; they are messy unpredictable generators of nightmares.” Ings’ observation that the mind is an idiosyncratic perceptual apparatus aptly expresses how consciousness interprets a confluence of diverse realities and psychologies. This stream-of-consciousness churns with the imaginative, and subsequently generates visionary perspectives. By employing still photography, traditional collage techniques and digital animation, Jeannette Louie produces experimental videos that represent a subjective re-imagining of reality. Primarily presented as projected installations, the videos operate as perceptual devices that illustrate the mind’s ability to envision the transitional states of being, seeing and perceiving.

Jeannette Louie’s interdisciplinary artworks explore the influence of perception upon the thinking mind. She has exhibited at Platform in Kimusa Seoul, Korea; Modern Fuel, Canada; Homie Berlin, Germany; the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, MI; Mills College Art Museum, CA; Esso Gallery, NY; ISE Cultural Foundation, NY; Ace Gallery, NY; Spaces, OH; Sala 1, Italy; and Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, Italy. Her honors include New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Fellowship, Creative Capital Foundation Grant and Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Brodsky Center at Rutgers University, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, Roswell Program, Vermont Studio Center, Skowhegan School and Sculpture Space.

Mayumi Nakazaki

hunt hunter hunted, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 13’00”

Mayumi Nakazaki is interested in sociological issues that deal with disguise, uniformity, and identity. Her video focuses on behavioral and conversational patterns between people from different cultural backgrounds. Alternative viewpoints are sought through investigating how individuals relate to various social concerns and conventions. As a fractured narratives, her video hovers between fiction and documentary. Confronting the gap between documentation and self-expression, the video questions the notion of objectivity and subjectivity.

Mayumi Nakazaki graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, NL, in 1995. Nakazaki is an alumna of residency programs, including Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL (2000); Sanskrit Kendra Foundation, Delhi, India (2004); and Location One, New York, NY (2005). Her video was screened in Visions in NYC at Macy Art Gallery Columbia University, NY (2009); Art Basel Miami; Verge Fair (2009); Kunstpavilion Zagreb, Croatia (2009); Home Affairs at Berlin Film Festival, Germany (2007) among other prestigious venues. Nakazaki received grants and awards including Bunkachou Prize from Arts Cultural Affairs, Japanese Government Oversea’s Study Program in New York (2008), Project Subsidy from Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (2004), Rene Coelho Prize from Netherlands Institute for Media Arts, Amsterdam (1999) among others.

Shani Peters

RePROGRAM: episodes 1-10, 2008, 10 videos, each one to three minutes long

RePROGRAM: episodes 1-10, 2008, 10 videos, each one to three minutes long

Shani Peters is interested in the power of collective activity, in the identification of the self within the whole, and in cyclical patterns throughout history and generations. Her work bridges her personal experiences with the collective history of Black people. Often, it examines this history and its present circumstances through the perspective of family structures, as they are microcosms for larger societal conditions. Her perspective is heavily informed by her own family and by the era in which she lives. She was born into the “me generation” of the socially conservative 1980’s by way of faithful Black Power era parents who live by a mantra of social responsibility. The constant programming, imagery, and instantly accessible information delivered by media/digital expansions from the 1980’s onward has also been a major force in her way of producing art. By appropriating semi-public sources, she crosses iconic signifiers of historical figures and movements (Black Panther Party members, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey) with those of fictional television characters and contemporary cultural icons. She recomposes these figures based on her perception of their historical relevance and more closely by the roles they have played in her personal socialization. Today, she seeks to fuse these influences by positioning one idea against, or with another, layering references through collage, installation, and video in an attempt to push back her own program—a new account, or record of existence.

Shani Peters (b. Lansing, MI) is a New York based artist focusing in video, collage, printmaking, and social practice public projects. Peters completed her BA at Michigan State University and her MFA at The City College of New York. She has exhibited and screened throughout New York, including group shows at Rush Arts Gallery, the International Print Center New York, and the Schomburg Center. She has completed residencies at The Center for Book Arts, LMCC Swing Space and is currently participating in the Bronx Museum’s 2010- 11 Artist in the Marketplace program. In addition to personal and public arts projects she works as a teaching artist with various community organizations.

Elizabeth Riley

. . . the new world, 2006, single-channel, color, sound, 06’20”

The video . . . the new world performs as a time capsule. In it, time is transparent, and so happens all at once; yet there is also a movement and reaching into a location beyond this transparent unity, which is the space of the future—perhaps (gleefully) glimpsed. From another perspective the video is linear, as in a western semblance of time, toward a goal; with yet another shift in perspective, the video is centered (literally the center of the video) on a fallen tree, which is materially strong and “whole” in death, and is a “beginning” and sustaining structure.

At the same time the video is an indexical/allegorical narrative of the present moment, and is/represents a (material) composition of the present moment. Woven into the video are a few commonly consumed items (normally which when eaten are transformed into the material of the human body) such as blueberries and eggs. These suggest and project the reality of a living body, but also stand in for individual entities/bodies. A gathering of these entities/ bodies forms and symbolizes a community.

The manipulation of these in the video occur as events—events analogous to the processes of the body such as thought, as creative process, digestive processes, and sexual or emotional connectivity; and also to “events” occurring in a community and world in a process of active change. As such the video shows danger and disruption, sensuality and joy in bonding and is a utopian narrative of the glue and interface that holds the body and the affiliated body of individuals together.

Elizabeth Riley’s videos and urban projects deal with impacts of the very present, physical and human, urban environment—as well as changes in contexts; the city dweller’s experience of and identification process in suburban or rural environments. The artist has participated in screenings, exhibitions, and collaborative and renegade projects in New York City and beyond. Her work has been seen in the Pool Art Fair in New York City and Miami, and her video Liberty was screened at Art Chicago. Recently her videos have appeared in screenings in Madrid, Copenhagen, and Berlin.

Linda Stein

Can Wonder Woman CRA-AC-CK! Gender Stereotypes?, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 06’02”

Referring to the super heroine comic figure, Wonder Woman—created by William Moulton Marston in 1941 to educate people about and promote non-violent and compassionate means of seeking peace and justice—and criticizing the TV version for morphing the figure into a sex object in the late 1970s, Linda Stein’s video references gender constructions that leave women struggling, even now, to break through the glass ceiling while sadly trying to maintain a culturally defined “femininity.” Stein critically reflects on her own experience growing up in a period in which boys and girls were often required to play their gender roles that are socially constructed, and produces works referencing gender-bending icons and role models in pursuit of Parity, Protection, and Peace.

Linda Stein is a sculptor and video artist living/working in Manhattan and East Hampton, NY. Her solo exhibition, The Power to Protect: Sculpture of Linda Stein has recently traveled from the Nathan D. Rosen Museum in Boca Raton, Florida, the Flomenhaft Gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan, SOFA in Chicago, and Longstreth Goldberg Art in Naples, Florida. She has been commissioned to create three larger-than-life outdoor bronze torsos as the central sculptures for the four million dollar Walk of the Heroines at Portland State University, Oregon, and a sculpture of hers is sited in the Adelphi University 2008-10 Biennial. Her videos have been shown in film festivals, universities, galleries, and museums.

Bradly Dever Treadaway

Floodlines, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 07’32”

Bradly Dever Treadaway’s work uses a range of new media and installationbased processes to reflect the breakdown of cultural passage—that is, the transference of histories, lineage, identity, and tradition between generations— and the reconstitution of memory. Materials related to New Orleans come from an archive of over 4000 family slides, historical documents, oral histories, 8mm film footage and other archival and public domain sources dating back to the 1880s. The artist then used digital technologies to filter these materials through a contemporary lens. The process creates a broken cycle, emphasizing the distance from our ancestors and evoking the fragility of intergenerational relations. Conceived initially as a response to his family’s experience with Hurricane Katrina, the works have evolved into an exploration of lineage by employing the archive as form, medium, an identity, and a legacy, and into a meditation on time and concepts concerning public/private memory.

Bradly Dever Treadaway is an artist and teacher utilizing photography, video, film and installation to emphasize socially conscious themes and selfawareness. His work revolves around the loss of family, tradition and history and aspires to reunite present and past through visual metaphors. Treadaway works with five generations of family archives from Southern Louisiana and joins them with his own creations, memories, and observations to comment on the breakdown of intergenerational links. Treadaway is an internationally exhibited artist, Fulbright Scholar to Italy and both a faculty member and the Digital Media Assistant at The International Center of Photography.

Christopher Udemezue

Untitled, 2009, single-channel, color, sound, 09’13”

Christopher Udemezue’s work addresses social phenomena, the socioeconomic landscape of gender politics, and ethnicity issues in relation to Afro-American male. His video exposes the social complexities surrounding African-American men within the conditions of American patriotism and racism. The video attempts to engage people in a dialogue of “what it means to be a man” and “what it means to be a black.”

Christopher Udemezue (b. 1986, Long Island, NY) earned his BFA from Parsons School of Design, NY in 2008. He received Dean’s Scholarship for his BFA study. As a young artist, he participated in exhibitions including Long Island’s Best: Young Artists at The Heckscher Museum of Art, NY, 2004, and I Will Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours at Parsons School of Design, New York, NY, 2007.

Anthony Cannon Walker

MOMU System Performance for Goldfish, 2006, piano and shakuhachi, duration variable

Anthony Cannon Walker is a photographer in a broad sense of the term; he is an artist who uses cameras, videos or the manipulation of light. The first version of the MOMU system, i.e., a system of Motion In and Music Out, was completed in 2006 as an automated, real time platform for incorporating live animal motion as a crucial element in live musical performance. This application of the system essentially puts a tiny animal, like a goldfish, into the much larger role of conductor, creating an original piece of music that is unique and unrepeatable. The system functions by tracking motion across any video source and instantaneously turning that information into a series of instructions to be interpreted by a live performer. Although the MOMU system was created initially with live video and music in mind, it was also designed to be open-ended enough that it can be utilized as a tool to bridge nearly any combination of video, motion, and performance.

Anthony Cannon Walker (b. 1981, Stockton, CA) received a BA in Japanese language from San Francisco state University in 2003 and an MFA from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 2007. Walker lives and works in New York.

Veronica Winter

Mouse, 2008, single-channel, color, sound, 04’49”

Veronica Winter’s video work revolves around real events or quietly beautiful short scenes that she collects, reorganizes and reconstructs in a fresh, unusual way. Her latest video Moonlight Sonata captures the musician, Ultramax, who also reconstructs, adds, and reinterprets Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into a techno grove.
Veronica Winters (b. Russia) lives and works in Pennsylvania. She received her MFA degree in painting from Penn State University in 2005. Her awardwinning surreal oil paintings and vivid, realistic colored pencil drawings have appeared in several art magazines in the UK and the US. Veronica also published an instructional book Master Realist techniques in colored pencil painting in 4 weeks: projects for beginners.

Ina Wudtke

Moonlight Sonata, 2010, UltraMax’ technoclassica of Beethoven, single-channel, color, sound, 05’11”

Veronica Winter’s video work revolves around real events or quietly beautiful short scenes that she collects, reorganizes and reconstructs in a fresh, unusual way. Her latest video Moonlight Sonata captures the musician, Ultramax, who also reconstructs, adds, and reinterprets Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into a techno grove.

Veronica Winters (b. Russia) lives and works in Pennsylvania. She received her MFA degree in painting from Penn State University in 2005. Her awardwinning surreal oil paintings and vivid, realistic colored pencil drawings have appeared in several art magazines in the UK and the US. Veronica also published an instructional book Master Realist techniques in colored pencil painting in 4 weeks: projects for beginners.