Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Statement of Artistic Endeavors

As an artist I am interested in creating work that engages the audience visually and intellectually. Physical matter combined with sound and audio become the disparate elements I arrange in order to reflect on nostalgia and question the current values of our digital age. I am interested in using digital processes to record and edit video and audio. The virtual digital information is then transferred to a deprecated analog format. In creating the antithesis of this summer’s monumental transition from analog to digital television, I’m specifically curious about nostalgia and how it fits into today’s society of “bigger, faster, stronger”. Growing up as a young child and having the physical ability to touch and interact with VHS tapes, as well as engage visually and aurally, created a multi-sensorial experience which models common human perception, which is in stark contrast to the state of sensory deprivation existing in today’s media.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Wideo Editing

Nostalgia: The Great Escape

SHE DREAMED OF BETTER DAYS:
an escape, nostalgia, the great escape


Once upon a dream in a far away land
that which never existed
however only perfectly imperceptible
except within the depths of her minds confines
while visions of fading pasts danced in her brain
From her wildest imagination to endless possibilities
came tragic limits plighting the desires and dreams...

Oh what bliss! What true unadulterated ignorance!
as her lashes dropped like curtains
from which shadows danced across
like forms on the walls decorating
a dimly illuminated cave
arriving while constantly fleeting
as moths and flames and candles and lives
forever do...

As light became dark
and dark becomes light
drifted into a light existence...
falling further toward the dark...
birth bloom decay, repeat
reaching , clawing, grasping,
a one way ticket to this cycle
lost, alas, oh dank depths, again
comfort: she sank back into the depth
letting the dark, then light, embrace her shoulders
to loose herself once more
in this life of slowly melting wax ...

For when its curtain call
and your last line is spoken
with a graceful bend at the waist
the rhythmic beating of clapping hands.
and the last rose has fallen upon
the fading lights and the silence
of the nothingness that is the sea
of crushed red velvet
a single ghost on the stage
the show is over
and the curtains are drawn back

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Monday, July 6, 2009

eleanor antin

“I make seemingly old films in order to enter the lost world of the past from the inside, not to stand outside of it and see it as history. The technology of a film determines a large part of what the audience sees. A Hollywood costume drama holds the subject of the film at the conventional distance of representation. I want my audience to experience this world as if from inside — but at the same time — with a sense of the distance they have traveled to get there.” — Eleanor Antin

THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD is one of the most unusual, artistic and fantastic films of the American Indie history. There is nothing else like it!

THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD is credited to the legendary (and imaginary) 1920s Soviet director, Yevgeny Antinov. But the film is anything but old. In fact, Antinov himself is the creation of contemporary filmmaker Eleanor Antin. A world-renowned artist, author and performer, Antin has exhibited her work at major museums around the world. In her art. Antin explores history through the eyes of various personas, including Eleanor Nightingale (a nurse in the Crimean War) and Eleanora Antinova, the famous black ballerina in Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe who wanted to star in Swan Lake but was only allowed "ethnic" roles like Pocahontas. This great and fictional dancer also appeared in Antin's earlier work From the Archives of Modern Art and The Last Night of Rasputin, also distributed by Milestone.

THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD is Antin’s “love letter” to her mother, a former actress in the Yiddish theater of Poland, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease at the time this film was created. Like the character Zevi in the film, Antin's mother yearned for the stages of Warsaw, but unlike him, she never made it to the big city.

THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD is a dark, comic melodrama set in a typical shtetl (village) in Poland. The Jews’ struggle against poverty and racial hatred is complicated by their own division into hostile political factions of the religious orthodoxy, assimilationists, socialists, Zionists, anarchists and survivors. While the Jews of the shtetl pursue their loves, politics, religion, business and dreams for the future, the Angel of Death is ever near...

Credit

nostalgia- a diagnosable disease

Nostalgia: a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Origin: late 18th century, acute homesickness. from Greek nostos 'return home' + algos 'pain.'

" Someone once told me that there are actually acupressure points in our fingertips that relate to the heart chakra and aid in healing grief, which I like to think might explain the knitting and needle work revival that sprung up after 9/11 and continues today."

"The subjects of loss and memory processes are also contained within nostalgic themes by default. And, these topics are explored in depth by scholars dedicated to photo theory, such as Roland Barthes. Much of this theory explores the idea that every photograph has some degree of melancholy affect in that the instant the image is captured it has already died; the moment is now the past, yet there is an attempt to hold on at the same time. These ideas are also extended to work that references photos or uses photographic processes in its production. Similar ideas about memory function are also explored in the study of Latin American Literature and the discussion of the existence of the phenomena of Realismo Magico (Magical Realism), in which the Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious actively come into play."
Credit: Bethany

Blast from the Past, ArtNews, January 2008

Beauty Knows No Pain, Art Journal, Summer 2004

The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art

Art21

interpretive fig newton dance