Laurie was inspired by Laurie Weeks’ uncanny ability to simultaneously embody her characters and write them from a clear distance. The text in question is just a few paragraphs from a draft of the novel Zipper Mouth, more than ten years in the making, and published by the Feminist Press.
A rural sunset at the edge of the water in WandaWega Waters. The natural rhythmic movement of the water’s surface becomes a highly colored abstraction in motion, a meditation on the intersection of nature and technology.
2 Channel Land is a north-western docu-fiction film exploring the history of analogue signals spilling across the borders of Ireland and Britain. Guided by a mysterious threshold deity, we take a journey through Ireland's borderlands in search of community.
In November of 2004, I was invited to spend a couple of weeks in Cinque Terre (a string of towns along the Northern Mediterranean Italian coast). The area has been listed as a World Heritage Site, by UNESCO, because of its exquisite coastline and the hill towns which cluster on its rocks. Indeed, one is easily overwhelmed by the place, the extraordinary beauty of the light and color, the geometry of the towns and the incredible way humans have inhabited the landscape.
In 1971 Robert Smithson (1938-73) was invited to create an earthwork in the Netherlands on the occasion of the recurring outdoor exhibition Sonsbeek.
Film and video maker Ken Kobland returns to the urban landscapes he filmed 20 years previously, such as the New York subway and the S-Bahn in Berlin. We leave, we travel, but it’s always the same images that we are drawn to. A moving road movie about eternal departure and arrival.
Craggy, ice-encrusted peaks soar skyward as blue lagoons lap incessantly to the drumbeats of big city behemoths hellbent on halibut and hashbrowns! The magic and grandeur of glacier-masked real estate is here for all to see and digest in this bountiful serving of natural delights.
Sequences of landscapes shot in an area of 60 km make up mosaics of places and reference axes constantly changing that do not exist in our surroundings. In this video bodies are not near or far. They are large or small. The horizons change and no space is independent from the viewer. Incorporating only memory, the landscape is seen in a variety of speeds and movements that apply a bodily logic to the vision.
Displays of violent weather conditions, electrical storms, tornados, floods, fires and other eruptions are contrasted and equated with equally awe-inspiring images of technology that harnesses or mimics nature. Pitting the spectre of nature against technology in time-lapsed images, this thoughtful and stirring tape paints a portrait of the encounter between the man-made and the natural—between man’s controlling power and that which eludes man’s control.
They just flew in from New York, and boy, are their arms tired... Out in the Nevada desert, against the windblown backdrop of Air Force bomber training sites, artists Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht — better known as eteam — gathered testimonials of stranded passengers, crew members, and local residents to recall an episode in the lost annals of American aviation: the 2006 "unscheduled layover" at International Airport Montello (IAM). Truth in Transit reaches beyond simple documentation.
Immaterial Terrain is a film made by Emily Richardson along a seven-mile stretch of the UK coast between Sizewell nuclear power station and the mythic drowned city of Dunwich. Camera in hand, over the duration of a year Richardson repeatedly walked this coastline. These walks – pilgrimages and acts of protest – structure a film that documents a singular and fragile landscape at an uncertain moment. Plans to expand the nuclear power station at Sizewell will have a lasting impact on the environment.
A poetic meditation on distance, Come Closer is a short and peripatetic film, casting an affective web between the locations of Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil. Focusing on Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, musician Derrick Green –– the filmmaker’s brother and lead singer of Brazilian band Sepultura –– and her own work produced in Lisbon since 1992, Come Closer can be thought as a meditation on friendship and saudade.
In the midst of the 2011 revolution in Cairo, a few beduins listen to their car's radio near Jericho, a place which looks like the end of the world. Within moments this desolated landscape transfers into a busy tourist attraction as a bus full of Polish Pilgrims enter the landscape.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
"I brought live reptiles, birds of prey and exotic flowers to a very stereotyped and neglected section of the city of St. Louis, Missouri which suffers from from severe abandonment and despair, but also has many tranquil vacant lots where nature flourishes. I chose these birds of prey for their symbolic meaning- The bald eagle a symbol of the United States, hawks and owls are messengers. But this is not a film about St. Louis, It's about an anonymous archetype more than a specific locale. St.
Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil-drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.
American sculptor and land artist Robert Smithson made art as a meditation on transition and change. Perhaps best known for his Spiral Jetty, an earthen berm that sits, occasionally submerged, in the Great Salt Lake of northern Utah, Smithson understood that his earthworks would be subject to natural and human forces and processes: erosion, rising water tables, and changing land use.
Next Atlantis is a video/sound collaboration between composer Sebastian Currier and filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik. It premiered at Carnegie Hall on January 29th 2010 and had another performance at Philadelphia's Annenberg Center the following night, Jan 30th, 2010. American Composer's Orchestra performed the musical score both nights. In addition to the video images and live orchestra the piece utilizes a surround soundtrack of taped and electronic sounds.
The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. A metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. A place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.
Leafless is a poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.
“But the sun is also fierce; neither graceful athlete nor geometrician’s dummy will embody Apollo, the idol of light.”
- Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956)
The secret history of hobo and railworker graffiti. Shot on freight trips across the western US over a period of 16 years, Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous rail graffiti--a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, "Bozo Texino"--a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years.
An instructional road trip clarifies how to prevent a baby from choking. The giver of said instructions communes with stray dogs along the ocean front. She builds seaside graveyards, petit and monumental sand mountains. She nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.
Jonas intercuts scenes of the Nova Scotia countryside with images of a studio set-up reminiscent of a di Chirico painting. The soundtrack includes both music and spoken excerpts from a journal Jonas kept while travelling in Nova Scotia. I Want to Live in the Country ultimately deals with observation and fantasy, living in the country, and the stifling aspects of the city and one's art.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
A cactus-strewn desert becomes the backdrop for this series of filmic stopovers that focuses on the living quarters assigned the assignee of this adventurous arrangement. Great natural beauty clashes with manufactured outdoorsmanship, as a tired body and sluggish mind seek the oblivion of hotel hospitality in an arid region of artistic aspirations. The viewer is introduced to a world of prickly plants and satin-skinned succubi who prowl the alleys of western decay to staple their fig leaflets on the vertical shafts that poke unsheathed at the virgin skies of southern Arizona.
Ground Effect is an investigation of the constantly shifting, 80km long line in Israel, where rainfall amounts to less than 200mm a year on average. This line, which aligns with the global desert belt, cuts from the east, near the West Bank, to the west, near the Gaza strip. It is where I grew up, an area divided between industrial scale agriculture, nature preserves, ancient and recent ruins, Bedouin towns, encampments and olive groves, artificial pine forests planted on contested lands, rural Jewish communities, and military practice zones.
MICA-TV creates a video format to express the idea of verticality and optimism common to the work of artists Dike Blair, Dan Graham, and Christian Marclay. Using a 360-degree camera rig to create a seamless revolving background of vertical camera moves, the video integrates the work of these artists who deconstruct and then reassemble elements of our culture to create their work.
