Combining Rubnitz’s skillful manipulation of the familiar “look” of TV shows with an extraordinary range of characters, performer Ann Magnuson convincingly impersonates the array of female types seen on TV in a typical broadcast day. From glitzy to drab, from friendly housewife to desperate evangelist, Magnuson is a one-woman universe appearing on every channel, the star of every program—giving her all as the chameleon woman who is always on display.
Woman, monster, animal? A portrait of a woman's face, the movement slowed down and reversed, the grotesquely made-up face examined in close-up.
Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.
"A piece about self-consciousness and the fearful noise of wind in the trees. Featuring myself as a woman who is lured into the garden by the cries of foliage, given a dinner she doesn't want by a mysterious organic being, and then turned into something else or maybe not. My first foray into digital editing and special hand crafted frame-by-frame effects."
--Jennet Thomas
Digital video, live action, digital video effects, human pixelation and model animation.
An animation developed from the collective experiences of a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ people to create a narrative. The result is a queer valentine having a fever dream.
Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work.
Take a trip into and out of the body to ponder Time’s endless depths where Earth spirits roam and inner Demons lurk, and find secrets that hide behind the "self". Its here for you to see.
This title comprises Moon Lit Vows (2017), Boy in the Mirror (2015), Celestial Horizons (2019), Book of the Angel (2017) and Floating on the Currents of Consciousness (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, 1.5mm Letter Punches, Hammer, Leather Puncher
This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. The aborted child survives and becomes her lover. Her subject is filmed in a private act, complicating what could be an act of the solitary.
Back in the days of hippy bliss, Ulrike and her husband used to believe that the world would be revolutionized by their activities, consisting mainly of smoking pot and having sex. Thanks to a large family fortune, none of them has ever had to work for a living. But the ‘three generation millions’ – one generation makes it, the second maintains it and the third generation blows it – are slowly disappearing. So now the burden of maintaining the tower falls on the children, of whom Sirius (the Latin form of Osiris) actually seems to enjoy making money.
There were three brides, and they all married at different times to different people in different places. They came from similar backgrounds and lived in the same general area, but circumstances had led them down parallel - never to cross - paths. One night, however, they all shared the same dreams…
In Dani Leventhal’s Platonic, geometric specters twirl in space; pet cats foam at the mouth; a little boy mistakes his junkie dad for a superhero; and a confused adolescent worries he has sired a centaur. Platonic references both the ancient philosopher’s metaphysics of ideal Forms, which simultaneously exist outside our perceptions and yet give rise to them, and the related meaning in common parlance of non-romantic love.
In shimmering rainbow hues, iridescent as the aurora borealis, this meditative presentation contemplates the mechanics inside existence. You’ll se a Soul’s loneliness and feel the bodies’ longings, while discovering answers to questions that haunt minds on sleepless nights…. It is the flesh of thought that reaches out into cosmic distances to touch the truth inside all of us!
Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved ones.
Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation, soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible, and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.
I drove around the U.S. filming these super maximum-security prison buildings the spring and summer after the World Trade Center bombing. I knew that counties within various states had been frantically outbidding each other to get these high-tech gulags to replace the farming and manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the last 25 years. The timing seemed right to remind everyone what we have been doing with our public funding and to draw parallels with the neo-liberal economic policies espoused with variations by the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations.
Sara Magenheimer earned her MFA at Bard in 2013 and has since shown her work internationally in Canada, Iceland, the Czech Republic, and Denmark. Her cross-disciplinary practice plays with the juxtaposition between the form and content of language, exposing the absurdity of expected meanings.
A familiar landscape comprised of big box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. An enigmatic protagonist reveals little moments of subjectivity that escape into the piece like a contaminant, rupturing the view and evidencing the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
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.
‘ODDS AND ENDS’ is a dazzling patchwork of moods, lost and found, for the eye to savor.
PASSIONS run deep and LOVE flies high on Cupid’s arrow when ‘Boys’ are the desired target.
An avatar, created through a 3D scan of Syms, navigates a plain and vast virtual landscape, the perspective sometimes floating above, sometimes alongside, as she progresses through a perpetual cycle of death and resurrection. Her avatar's journey seems to reflect the spectacularly confusing or nonsensical experience of inhabiting a body during a time of violence and illness that has unceasingly threatened notions of stability and consequentiality, forcing ever-evolving tactics of survival.
The police phoned. They left a message on the machine. They said he was dead. The video unwinds through stories of sex for rent, unclaimed bodies, cigarette burns, and other monuments of life’s long run from wall to wall. Cut the Parrot is three grotesque comedies in one: the stories of Gerry, Susan, and Albert. Songs of hope and heartbreak spill from the mouths of the performers. The order of impersonation rules.
Are Reese and Ryan in "God's Eden," – or is it "Darwin's Jungle" they populate?
A conversation about marriage and horses between two unseen men.
This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming: Four Short Pieces.
The Only Ones Left (three-channel video installation*), featuring actor Jim Fletcher, weaves film noir and mafia genre references with CEO diatribes, while also exposing the conventions of the feature film climax. The three channels of video depict all plot points of the Hollywood film climax concurrently. The channels are arranged chronologically from left to right. This simultaneity draws attention to the familiarity of the subject matter and the inevitability of the violent consequences awaiting the characters.
An Ocean Between Us expresses the desire for a relationship that is made up of transitions, successive time shifts, and coordinated changes without an essential unity. This project tells a story about a couple that roam inside a boat moored in a slip along the dock by the port of Lisbon, waiting for the ‘last call’ to departure to Luanda. In the video the audio track is composed of the sounds of boat engines and waves from the ocean that brought this couple together, and now take them apart. They walk close to each other, but are spiritually far apart.
