Film and Video – Page 5

NYC Art Shows- Ja’Tovia Gary at Paula Cooper Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Mar 092023

Ja’Tovia Gary “Citational Ethics (Zora Neale Hurston, 1943)”, 2023, wood, neon and engraved obsidian

Ja’Tovia Gary “Citational Ethics (Zora Neale Hurston, 1943)”, 2023, wood, neon and engraved obsidian (detail)

Currently at Paula Cooper Gallery in NYC is Ja’Tovia Gary’s You Smell Like Outside…, an exhibition that centers around her 2023 film, Quiet As It’s Kept, and includes two new sculptures.

From the press release-

The artist continues her practice of interrogating and re-contextualizing multiple archives, concerning herself with the power and responsibility of language and the radical possibilities of narrative. The exhibition title You Smell Like Outside… is a Black Southern phrase that foregrounds the artist’s specific cultural origins with discursive traditions that invoke an interior knowledge. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Laureate lecture, Gary attempts to heighten the contradictions between a living and a dead language. Notions of domesticity, interior and exterior, and the conflict between perception and being perceived are explored in the show.

With a filmic and sculptural language uniquely her own, Gary eloquently intervenes into foundational renderings of Black life to expand the conversation and the possibilities of being. The artist considers what is destabilized when we include the cinematic within the category of language, asserting: “if we are to ensure the future efficacy of storytelling, we must boldly and audaciously insist upon new narrative forms.” Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) is a contemporary response to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel published in 1970. Set in Ohio in 1941, the book is an evocative illustration of the everyday particulars of colorism and its ravaging effects on the intramural. Themes of embodiment, psychoanalysis, and beauty are explored in both the source text and the answering film. Instinctual and eviscerating, the film encourages viewers to make meaning that is rooted in the subjective and examine their position within looking relations.

Following Gary’s critically acclaimed films THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT (2019) and An Ecstatic Experience (2015), Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) is an intimate bricolage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Mediating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also re-contextualizes contemporary social media footage. Creating conceptual links for each viral clip to a character, event, or thematic element from Morrison’s story, the film emphasizes questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture. Situated within an immersive installation with domestic elements, the film asks the viewer to employ an oppositional gaze that allows for narrative structures that run counter to those of the mainstream.

High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning. First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. [1]

The sculptures in Gary’s Citational Ethics series illuminate the words of Black women through the medium of neon, with the title of each work serving as a citation for the quote. Citational Ethics (Zora Neale Hurston, 1943) cites Zora Neale Hurston’s 1943 essay on High John de Conquer, a Southern folk trickster figure who brought joy, laughter, and strength to enslaved people while continuously evading capture. The sculpture is a vanity mirror set which gestures towards a speculative future past. Comprising a desk, stool, and fan-shaped obsidian mirror, the object invokes the Harlem Renaissance, Art Deco, and southern Black Hoodoo lore. A departure from the previous works in the series, the quote is etched into the highly polished black stone said to bring about visions through gazing, while the furniture is rendered in neon. Drawing the viewer in to read the words written in the mirror while bathed in red light, the sculpture summons an intimate encounter with the self and spirit.

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, “High John de Conquer,” in The American Mercury, October 1943, pp. 450-458

This exhibition closes 3/11/23

NYC Art Shows- Video Art at Gladstone Gallery, Metro Pictures, and GRIMM

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Mar 112018

Cyprien Gaillard, Nightlife (Images above via Gladstone gallery)

At Gladstone Gallery, Cyprien Gaillard‘s 3-D film Nightlife is a wonderfully immersive experience. Starting with Rodin’s The Thinker at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the film then moves to a series of plants and trees moving in slow motion in Los Angeles, followed by the annual Pyronale fireworks at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, and finally a return to Cleveland, where a helicopter lights up the site where Jesse Owens’ Olympic oak is planted. While the film plays, a dub song reverberates throughout the room on a loop, adding to the dreamlike atmosphere.

This exhibition closes 4/14/18.

Oliver Laric, Year of the Dog (Image via Metro Pictures)

At Metro Pictures is Oliver Laric‘s two part exhibition, Year of the Dog. The video animation, the stronger part of the show, takes place in the main gallery.

From the press release–

The animation continues his inquiry into concepts of metamorphosis, encompassing concerns about time and the complex dynamic between human and nonhuman lifeforms. Against a white background, linear animations of fish, fungi, and other figures move and change shape. The lines composing the animations continually extend or contract to zoom in on greater and greater detail, magnifying a sense of time as the images change. While the shapes and figures, as in his previous video works, are drawn from cartoons and Japanese anime, Laric’s subject matter has grown to also include animations based on live footage. He constructed the animation via an exacting technique in which each line moves continually between sequences—in contrast with traditional techniques in which each sequence consists of a series of redrawn frames. As the shapes perpetually transform, an atmospheric soundtrack commissioned from musician Ville Haimala establishes the sense of an unfolding narrative.

In the back gallery are three resin sculptures of a human dog hybrid holding a smaller dog in its arms, titled Hundemensch. Each sculpture is from the same mold but differs in opacity and color.

This exhibition closes 4/14/18.

Desiree Dolron, Complex Systems (2017)- Image via GRIMM

Finally if you are on the Lower East Side, near the ICP Museum and the New Museum is GRIMM gallery, which is currently showing Desiree Dolron’s video, Complex Systems (2017). Her digital illustrations of the movements of starlings are made more intense by the unnatural patterns she includes, and the sounds that accompany the piece.

From the press release–

Complex Systems displays a digitally drawn flock of starlings, scattering throughout the sky in a loop of ever-changing patterns. In this work themes such as the fragility of existence, impermanence and the dichotomy between the individual and the collective form the conceptual ground of her inquiry. The title of the film is adopted from the scientific field of network research, which employs the term to define the complex interactions between different components of the same group.

The shapes assumed by the birds are proven to be the result of a defense mechanism system: in order to avoid attack by predators, a singular starling keeps track of seven others simultaneously – in doing so, the starling is able to adapt to the changing flying directions of the entire flock, thus keeping the collective intact. The dichotomy between the individual and the collective is at the core of Dolron’s interest in this natural phenomenon. Complex Systems investigates the relation between singular and shared intelligence, prompting questions concerning humanity, the psyche and the possible presence of a collective unconscious.

The link to the human psyche is emphasized by the cyclical character of the film; Dolron underlines the full turn of life in which the starlings function as a metaphor. Their movements change from an initial drive to a final, slow fall, while the murmuration happens in an eternal loop that symbolizes the cycle of life and its fragility. The movements of the starlings, combined with the pivotal soundtrack of murmuring voices that intensify and fade according to the flock’s movements, allude to the human mind in a state of constant flux.

NYC Art Shows- Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Digital Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film

Oct 202017

Fanon (Even the Dead Are Not Safe) 2017 (image via Metro Pictures)

Artificial intelligence is a growing field with numerous implications for the future, some more sinister than others. Trevor Paglen’s current exhibition at Metro Pictures gives some insight into this evolving technology.

From the Metro Pictures press release-

Trevor Paglen’s A Study of Invisible Images is the first exhibition of works to emerge from his ongoing research into computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and the changing status of images. This body of work has formed over years of collaboration with software developers and computer scientists and as an artist-in-residence at Stanford University. The resulting prints and moving images reveal a proliferating and otherwise imperceptible category of “invisible images” characteristic of computer vision.

Paglen’s exhibition focuses on three distinct kinds of invisible images: training libraries, machine-readable landscapes, and images made by computers for themselves. For Machine-Readable Hito, for example, Paglen took hundreds of images of artist Hito Steyerl and subjected them to various facial recognition algorithms. This portrait of Steyerl presents the images alongside metadata indicating the age, gender, emotional state and other signifiers that the algorithms have interpreted from the images. In another portrait in the show, Paglen trained facial recognition software to read the face of philosopher Frantz Fanon. A ghostly image of Fanon shows the facial signature–the unique qualities of a face as determined by biometric recognition software–used by computer vision to identify an individual.

To make the prints in Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Paglen trained an AI to recognize images associated with taxonomies such as omens and portents, monsters, and dreams. A second AI worked in tandem with the first to generate the eerie, beautiful images that speak to the exuberant promises and dark undercurrents characterizing our increasingly automated world.

The video installation Behold These Glorious Times! brings together hundreds of thousands of training images routinely used for standardized computer vision experiments and pairs them with visual representations of an AI learning to recognize the objects, faces, expressions and actions. A loose narrative begins to emerge about the collapsing distinctions between humans, machines and nature. Electronic musician Holly Herndon composed a soundtrack using libraries of voices created to teach AI networks how to recognize speech and other acoustic phenomena.

The image below is one of the prints from Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations. A series of these images, presented all in one room in the back gallery, are particularly unsettling as they have elements that seem familiar while remaining distorted. As artworks, they are captivating in their strangeness as well as their beauty.

Porn (Corpus: The Humans) 2017 (image via Metro Pictures)

The exhibition also has a printout with more detail about the creation of the work that goes beyond the press release, located at the front of the gallery. Make sure to leave time to take in this fascinating show. A Study of Invisible Images closes 10/21/17.

NYC Art Shows- Chelsea- Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina at The Kitchen

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Feb 182017

For Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina’s exhibition at The Kitchen, Asymmetrical Response, the early days of the internet come to life in various artworks. The carpet is made of a diamond plate pattern that used to be a common background on 1990s websites and the wallpaper uses patterns from early Yahoo templates. One of the most interesting pieces is Lialina’s Give me time/This page is no more, a slide projection of former popular hosting site Geocities’ members home pages that promise a site they will create or come back to in the future. It’s hard not to look at these pages and wonder how soon what we are seeing now on the web will seem as antiquated as these images.

From the press release-

In military parlance, the terms asymmetrical and symmetrical are employed to refer to political provocations and diplomatic démarches, escalation and tension, and power dynamics of the highest order. Not specific to war, these terms also refer more generally to a set of relations that define our connections to power.

On the eve of Y2K, Russian-born Olia Lialina—who is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene—first met American artist Cory Arcangel. Ever since, the artists have been deep in dialogue about the social and cultural impact of the Internet’s historical shift from a tool for military communication to an “information superhighway” promising open and equal exchange, and, finally, the increasingly asymmetric “content delivery system” we experience today.

This show closes 2/18/17.

Jamie XX- Gosh

Art, Music, Video and Film

Feb 122017

Jamie xx- Gosh

The Grammy Awards are tonight and the above video is one of the nominations for Best Music Video. It was directed by Romain Gavras, son of Costa-Gavras who has made numerous feature films, including Z and Missing, which won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Romain Gavras has received a lot of attention in the past for his more violent videos including Born Free for M.I.A., which depicts a military attack on red haired people, and Justice’s Stress, which focused on a Parisian youth gang. The video for Gosh takes place in the Chinese city of Tianducheng. The city was built to replicate Paris and to house 10,000 residents, but its current population of about 2,000 gives it a ghost town quality which adds to the eeriness of this video.

For a more on the making of Gosh– here is a behind the scenes look, which includes a scene of the children’s hair being bleached (and only for that day!)-

For even more information, Dazed has an interesting article on Gosh, the director’s previous work, and an interview with Gavras.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Karl Haendel at Susan Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Digital Art, Los Angeles Art Shows

Feb 112017

Rodeo 10, 2016 (Photo credit Jeff McLane)

Hillary Clinton, 2016 (Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer)

Karl Haendel‘s solo exhibition BY AND BY at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, is a collection of highly detailed drawings mixed with earlier work made in 2000, and a new video piece. Included in the earlier work is State Motto Map, a colorful map of the United States, with each state’s motto labeled on it. Washington State’s motto is Alki, or Al-ki, a Native American word meaning bye and bye, and is where the title of this exhibition is drawn from.

From the press release–

In this exhibition, Haendel uses the idea of the portrait to explore contemporary definitions of masculinity, power, and public identity. He undertakes the challenging task of drawing a portrait of what it is to be a man, or perhaps what is expected of men, in images that span a broad range of representations from the heroic to the abject, from the depiction of male achievement in the highest ranks of power to a raw and unsympathetic examination of a middle-aged convicted sex offender. An inquiry into what represents masculinity also requires a look at the conventions of gender representation, as masculinity and femininity have so long been defined, particularly in images, as a codependent set of complimentary traits. In “By and By” Haendel both reasserts and undermines these conventions in heroic portraits of teenage girls riding rodeo, reproductions of murals depicting black civil rights leaders, and a monumental portrait of Hillary Clinton. His drawings and his video work against a tradition of portraiture that collapses individuals into ciphers and symbols that read as shorthand for historical legacies and narrative tropes.

This show closes 2/11/17.

(images via Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects)

Video Art- “Unsatisfying” by Parallel Studio

Art, Video and Film

Nov 062016

Unsatisfying by Parallel Studio

Love this funny, relatable video.

Here is some information from their Vimeo page-

During the summer of 2016, We created and directed a video about unsatisfying situations: the frustrating, annoying, disappointing little things of everyday life, that are so painful to live or even to watch.

We quickly realized that there are a lot of other situations that would be fun to see animated, so we decided to run an animation challenge around this idea.

Join the Unsatisfying Challenge Here : unsatisfying.tv/

Direction Animation and illustration : Parallel Studio
Sound Design : Zelig Sound
Music : Samuel Barber
Special Thanks to : Hugo Leick

Los Angeles Art Shows- Closing Soon in Culver City

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Dec 192015

zemerpeledmarkmooregalleryorange

Work by Zemer Peled

Art Culver City, the group exhibition currently at Mark Moore Gallery, was created in response to the current state of art fairs- which have become more about celebrity and parties than the art itself. The focus here is on the art. Standouts include Zemer Peled’s sculptures created from hand-crafted shards of porcelain (pictured above), Kim Rugg’s maps recreated using only city names and regions and Christopher Russell’s photo prints that have images scratched into them with a razor. This show closes 12/19/15.

While in Culver City make sure to stop by Maloney Fine Art to see Jeff Colson’s incredibly realistic sculpture, Stacks (pictured above), created from carved wood. This show closes 12/19.

Also closing 12/19 in Culver City and worth checking out-

Rosson Crow’s multimedia exhibition at Honor Fraser Gallery Madame Psychosis Holds a Séance, “explores the fictional world of Madame Psychosis, an aging showgirl obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” The center piece is Crow’s first film, which stars Kelly Lynch as Madame Psychosis in outfits designed by Jeremy Scott.

At Anat Egbi Gallery is Jen Denike’s show ‘If She Hollers” which consists of three films and still images from them. “The show’s three protaganists feature “The Boxer”,“The Cat” and “The Pimp” interweave elements adapted from references ranging from Joe Lewis to Alice in Wonderland and RuPaul’s Drag Race”.

Cheryl Louise Humphreys’ embossed paper images at her premier solo exhibition “I Just Have This Feeling…” explore visual communication in a digital age at Paul Loya Gallery

Halloween Films- The American Scream / A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Films, Halloween

Oct 312015

Thinking of staying in this Halloween? You can still enjoy the spirit of Halloween from the comfort of your home, courtesy of two films currently streaming on Netflix.

The first, The American Scream, is the story of three families in Fairhaven, Massachussetts and their personal quests to turn their homes into Halloween haunted houses. The perfectionism and creativity of the attraction creators combined with the support and help of their families, make for an incredibly touching film with plenty of humor mixed in. It’s also a portrait of the community, and it’s a joy to see people come out in large numbers to see the finished work on Halloween.

Part love story, part vampire film, part Western, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, takes place in the fictional, often seemingly deserted Bad City in Iran (it was shot in California). With its ghostly oil rigs and a mysterious pit full of dead bodies, it’s also a place with a lot of bad things going on beyond just the local vampire. The Girl spends her nights wandering around town doling out justice and interacting with the troubled locals. One night she ends up making a connection with a young gardener who has done some bad things himself. Although less a traditional horror movie and more a surreal look at isolation and loneliness with horror themes, it is also beautifully shot with a great soundtrack.

Throwback Thursday- Beirut

Films, Music, Throwback Thursday

Oct 082015

Beirut- Elephant Gun

This video for Beirut’s song from 2007 was directed by Alma Har’el who also directed the famous Sigur Rós video Fjögur píanó which stars Shia LeBeouf (seen below). She also directed the documentary film Bombay Beach which takes place in the community near the Salton Sea.

Beirut are playing 10/8/15 at the Hollywood Palladium

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