Art History

In My Dinner With Weegee Donigan Cumming weaves together two life stories. The central figure, a man in his seventies named Marty, remembers his experiences in New York as a young Catholic labour organizer and peace activist, his friendships with David Dellinger, the Berrigan brothers, Bayard Rustin, Weegee, and James Agee. This mixture of first-hand knowledge and gossip brightens Marty’s dark passage—he is old, sick, depressed, and alcoholic.

Shot in Naples, Vienna, and New York, Some Chance Operations explores the notion of an archival form, in this instance film, as an unstable memory receptacle that can vanish. History and how it is made is meditated upon as one of many chance operations. The filmmaker Elvira Notari, who had a film production company in Naples from 1906 to 1930, plays a significant role as an impetus for Some Chance Operations. Despite the fact that she was a prolific filmmaker, producing over sixty feature films, only three remain intact.

The Videofreex document a street intervention by Turkish artist Tosun Bayrak (b.1926). The performance was to become a notorious example of the element of "shock" in contemporary art. Within the work:

Museum collections of various kinds are the object of artist Dana Levy's ongoing, consistent study in the past decade.

Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality.

The Badger Series has issues and attempts, each episode, to resolve them. Recasting a glove puppet show through his own present day sensibilities, Paul assumes the role of kindly uncle mentor to a household of capersome woodland creatures. Mortality, self-sacrifice, depression, altered states of consciousness and transgressive art practices are all explored as part of their everyday lives together.

This work attempts to further the critical dialogue surrounding the strategies of repetition and re-enactment. The Apparent Trap is a work that reminds the audience of the psychoanalytic implications of these strategies. It examines Walt Disney’s The Parent Trap (1961), a story in which twins decide to switch identities. The conceit of identity, the violence that erupts when one is confronted with one’s mirror image, and the “trap” of identification with the Other are all themes explored by re-enacting selected video art that speaks to these issues.

Cyclops / "monitor" / minotaur.

Note: A 20-second video loop self-portrait.