Current Exhibition
Nothing is Impossible Senior Exhibtion 2021
A time-based exhibition featuring works by thirty-four individuals and collectives. On display in multiple locations throughout the university. Enjoy works in performance, animation, and film on continuous view.
Uncompressed List of Participating Artists
Anna Garner
Pratfall
2014
single-channel video
4:17
Artist Statement
In the video performances, Just Below and Pratfall I perform premeditated falls referencing the rehearsed yet precarious slips of physical comedy. As both the director and target of the mishaps, I attempt to control my own demise, creating visual contrast between probabilities of security and calamity. The conscious attempts to control bodily risk, admit the inability to actually do so, and tensions are stretched regarding the exact moment of the fall (a factor that I cannot regulate). The formal and minimal constructions additionally reference Minimalism’s finitude and certainty; through the breakdown of these hypermasculine structures, I create alternate interfaces where uncertainty and the loss of control are charged with possibility. Inserting my own anxiety into this space, it can no longer exist as neutral or essential, instead they capture intimate self-portraits of my body in physical uncertainty.
Julia Barbosa Landois
Sidesteps (Purslane)
video and cut paper animation
2:21 minutes
2021
Artist Statement
My videos, installations, and performances tease profundity and absurdity from the everyday and examine the relationship between the intimate and the public. I like to draw attention to small things that hold big meaning.
My most recent series considers climate change, non-linear temporality, and the vulnerability of bodies caught in the middle of it all. The images in Container Cycle 3, an ouroboros of interlocking plastic containers and wheels of arms bailing water in buckets, are inspired by storm recovery and Gulf Coast industry as well as medieval European, Pre-Columbian, and Buddhist depictions of time and the cosmos. Sidesteps (Purslane) contemplates a common native plant as a symbol of resilience in the face of environmental and familial trauma. Both videos employ animation made from my own cut up old silkscreen prints.
A conceptual interest in the lineage of previous use, as well as a desire to conduct a more sustainable studio practice, inform my commitment to valuing the materials that are already all around me and repurposing my old work to make the new.
Rachel Yurkovich
Wendy Park (Dave's Bag)
Looped video
2:05 min
GENERAL ARTIST STATEMENT
In our modern world, there is a struggle to monitor appetites and avoid overindulgence. I am in constant observation of thoughtless choices, noticing that we often do not realize the weight of the impact we have on ourselves and our environment. In response to this, I frame instances of uninhibited consumption and the damaging consequences they often bring. The recent way this
is being explored is in my video series Foreign Bodies. For this I am capturing moving images of instances where human-made and non-human nature interrupt each other, going where they're "not supposed to". These are shots of situations normally overlooked, such as plastic bags caught in trees, or road kill on the pavement.
Hanien Conradie (South Africa) and Margaret LeJeune (USA)
Dart
Video
2018
Artist’s Statement:
This film documents Conradie writing poetry on the surface of the River Dart in Southwest England. Exploring notions of communal and ancestral pain as well as the power of the landscape to transform and heal, Dart weaves together drone footage of a watery ritual with Afrikaans and English audio recordings. This work was recently screened at Circe Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa and Science Cabin, UNIST, in Ulsan, South Korea.
B. Lynch
Grey Days
HD video
03:20
Artist’s Statement
Grey Days reflects a sci-fi society that has grave disparities. The eighteenth century garbed Reds have power and lovely palaces. The humble Greys work in the service of the Reds but some are engaged in fighting back. The Horse-headed martial vizier of the Reds rains down lightning on the Greys. The Greys’ resistance leader, Wolf-man, doesn’t shrink from violence. The Reds’ bully boys intimidate the populace. The cycle of violence is repeated over and over. What and where is Justice?
The narrative is ambiguous as the video is made with the intent of both reflecting reality and challenging it. The 3:20 minute video is composed of animation, live action and constructed digital imagery. The soundtrack is created by the artist. The distressed and stylized film look echoes the emotional content.
John Harlan Norris
Costume Change Forever
2021
8:28
Experimental Animation
1920x1080
Artist’s Statement
I am engaged in an ongoing project that reinterprets the genre of portrait painting in order to speak about ideas of personhood in our current moment. By stretching the parameters of the genre and magnifying certain elements beyond their typical roles, I make portraits that investigate our rapidly changing sense of ourselves as forces such as technology, media, capitalism, and globalization present new challenges and My current series, titled Interpolators, focuses on the process of constructing public persona at a time in which our likenesses have become increasingly malleable, fraught, and self-searching. In these works, signifying objects collide and disperse to build portrait subjects which appear hyper-performative yet exist in a constant state of flux. These objects, symbols, and patterns both attach and remove themselves from the human form at such a dizzying pace that they often seem to evoke unpredictable weather patterns to which the subjects must adapt. This interaction seeks to investigate the inherent contradiction between the increasing pressure for self-presentation and personal branding with the fluid and ever-changing experience of being a person. Ultimately, I view these works as a depiction of a moment in which the construction of persona, once a rare and curious phenomenon, is now as ubiquitous, relentless, and mercurial as the weather itself.
Erica Quinn
The Language of Your Body
video projection of sequential film stills, 1:45
2021
https://www.ericaquinnstudio.com/#/the-language-of-your-body/
Artist’s Statement
My practice incorporates photography, moving image, and poetry to explore the complexities of space and place. Excavating questions of memory and loss, these project range in scale from the personal- meditations on my childhood home- to the global- the layered narratives of the 20th century embedded in Berlin's urban infrastructure. My work often divorces itself from the representational, and I embrace the irregularities and unpredictability of my chosen materials—film others have chosen to discard, nearly inoperable cameras whose shutters gape and controls stick.
Building on these themes, my more recent work explores an expanded sense of the traces and layers of memory in space and place. Through the use of long-expired film, these images ask the viewer to question what is accurate, actual when describing a place. In these images, I revisit past landscapes of deep personal meaning to me, where I no longer belong, mourning the death of foundational relationships that have imbued those places with significance. In this work, I articulate a communal sense of the occupation of a dislocated, liminal state. The physical and interior landscapes I document continue to evolve, widen, and deepen, until parts become shallower, soft and are erased, remembered only in anecdote or artifact. These images and videos are both of those, mapping our collective proof of life, and my own terra incognita.
Anna Ialeggio
man (birdie) & crane (shuttlecock)
Performance for camera, 2:37 minute loop
2020
Man: Anna Ialeggio
Crane: Robyn O’dell
Cinematography: Jacob Kelley
Video Animation: Miranda Javid
Artist’s Statement:
I make interdisciplinary art in a braid of performance, drawing, sculpture, writing, and video. I’m drawn by themes in natural history— I find that any given, simple “fact” rebounds between empiricism and myth, journalism and speculation, edifice and wilderness, capital and autonomy, stasis and evolution. My projects tend to begin with travel, research, and reflection, moving through a writing and drawing phase until forms, images, and gestures emerge. Objects and ideas circulate, never resting in any single place. Currently, I am exploring the social histories of biological endangerment — specifically, stories about human individuals working one-on-one with members of critically imperiled species, such as the Whooping Crane — and using my training as a clown as a primary tool to explore the congealing of concepts, projections, and inheritances that make up a body’s performance of an identity, including my own as a white, queer, gendernonconforming artist.
I tend towards the lens of shifting baseline syndrome: the collective loss of perception of change that occurs when each generation redefines what is "natural” or “normal.” Marine scientist David Pauly articulated this concept in order to describe limitations inherent in using human perceptions of change to inform marine conservation policy-making or management. I extend the term as a conceptual, poetic and ethical framework for digging into the accumulated social and cognitive biases by which human cultures conceptualize things like “land” and “land use,” and how those biases affect the other human and nonhuman life enmeshed in that land. At the same time I use the term as a conceptual, poetic and ethical framework to include and inquire of performance and artwork: what are my norms, and how do they shift?
Anthony Warnick
Bad News Travels Fast
2019/2020
Custom Software
Dimensions Variable
https://vimeo.com/514770435/656278e010
Artist’s Statement
My practice makes the viewer aware of the systems, information, social, and technological, within which we operate. I take an information dense system like the news and through repositioning components re veal the core operation of the system. I borrow the forms; treating art history as a database, retrieving and restoring for future creation. Art is a cultural process of remixing and sharing to produce new works. The use of borrowed forms can be most clearly seen in 16 News Channels which remixes Christian Marclay’s 48 War Movies (2019). 16 News Channels expands and refocus the ideas from Marclay by presenting the live news all at once in a cacophonous excess. This intentional remaking highlights the collaborative pro duction of culture.
Artists, both historically and currently, translate the world as it is into the world as it should be. I reveal the world in all of its excesses; using this tactically to attract and expose the horror inflicted by our country. My current body of work focuses on the news media with its always-on-firehose approach to information. Within each work the news subject is abstracted and rendered opaque drawing the viewers attention to the system these subjects inhabit. Exemplifying this is the work 24 Hour News Machine, an entire
evening of CNN in which anchors and guests are replace with swirling moirés. This work make literal the criticism that cable news stimulating without informing while the work literally and figuratively flattens the coverage to line and form devoid of depth.
STEFANI BYRD
The Razor’s Edge
Single Channel Vertical HD Video
2016
Artist’s Statement
The breath is a constant reminder of our physicality and an anchor to our embodied experience. In these video portraits performers exhale slowly against an unseen piece of glass, fogging and obscuring their faces in fleeting moments between breaths. When shown on individual vertical video monitors, it creates the illusion that the performers are breathing against the glass of the screen. This work references the use of the “breath test” in the era before modern medicine where a mirror would be placed under the nose of the dying to test for respiration.
The illusion in the video is uncanny and the screen itself becomes the edge of the razor that separates both past from present, performer from viewer, and the living presence of the viewer from the illusion of life on the screen. An exploration in impermanence, embodiment, and the mediating presence of the screen, the work captures the breath - making it visible just long enough to be confronted by both performer and viewer.
Dan Rule
Ascension
Animation, seamless loop
4’24”
2019
Artist’s Statement
Some of my recent video projects emphasize and subvert our collective idealized visions of specific landscapes that in no way exist in reality. The Cave, the Waterfall, etc. as ideas are made into places at once both pastoral and unsettling. The unreal, flat physical space that collage creates has a fun conflict with the landscape painting convention of depicting objects both very near and very far. The landscapes seem to imply some type of extinction event, did we cause it or try our best to avert it?
Jay Goldberg
The Memory of America: Six Stories
One-Channel Video
2020,
14:24
https://vimeo.com/426439638 (Password: Musial)
Artist’s Statement
Dating back to the Hebrew Bible, we are required to remember and adjured not to forget.
Through human connection and dynamic artistic exploration, my work seeks to spotlight memories and the stories of self.
In “The Memory of America: Remember Your First Baseball Game,” we see ourselves in the memories of diverse strangers, through a uniquely American experience connecting generations. Baseball is merely the turnstile.
The evolving multimedia project is about age, race, economic class, religion, politics, gender, love, education, assimilation, immigrants, community, disability, humanity, equality, family, the past, the present, the individual, the collective.
All interactions begin: “Remember your first baseball game?” Memories return. I listen, carefully. Video is captured through an iPhone, placed to the side before the dialogue begins. We speak face-to-face. The interviews occur across the country, but not in a ballpark.
Never identified by their job or what they do, simply their name, stadium and year. Interview subjects include public figures, poet laureates, plumbers. None of that is shown, for none of that matters.
In a nation polarized and frayed, this multimedia memory installation inspires empathy, connection and understanding.
At some point, unless preserved, memories die. The artistic influence to keep these memories alive… and remember? You. America. All of us.
Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson
River Ghosts
video
2019
4:22
https://vimeo.com/254507963 password: river
Artist’s Statement
My work uses experimental documentary strategies as a way of situating and exploring the physical, historical and abstract spaces that exist in both of my homes in Southeast Asia, the Midwestern United States and other temporary residencies.
My deep interest in explorations of place stems from my experience of having a fragmented sense of self, family, culture and collective history—and ultimately, home. I am particularly interested in how we come to know a place and what elements contained within a landscape or locale hold narrative, historical and personal agency.
Videos, films, photographic prints, books and site-specific collaborative teaching projects make up the bulk of my art practice, but I am open to using any forms that best fit the project at hand.
Sarah Crofts
Moons
13 minutes 15 seconds
2018
Artist’s Statement
The interplay of representation, performance of self and the act of looking permeate and often dictate daily life. I’m interested in how various recording media frame this relationship, and what friction occurs between the agency of the media and intent of the content creator.
Mallory Donen
Part 1: Introduction - What Am I?
Video, conceptual
3:31
2020
Artist’s Statement
My practice investigates the repetitive processes of embroidery, knitting, digital image making using Photoshop, and how they are similar in their use of mechanical systems. While embracing systematic processes and creating art as though I am a machine, I explore the dichotomy between fast-paced digital technologies and the time-consuming practices of cross stitching, knitting, and other needlework.
Repetitive actions have the ability to make the artist into a mindless machine. Similar to how our society can get lost in the daily consumption of digital technology, I mirror this obsession through my laborious approach to making art. My obsessive repetitive practice allows for mind-numbing escape, as well as deep exploration of the subconscious and a constant reminder of what makes me human.
Katina Bitsicas
1422 1829 1702
HD video
2019
2:20
In my creative practice I explore personal loss and trauma through video, installation, photography and performance to make parallels between these experiences. My multimedia works revolve around the theme of bringing back to life, while the afterlife is still looming near. The overarching theme is how we as humans can connect via shared experiences and make meaning of these experiences. Metaphors, such as red thread, are used as symbols for loss and the longing for connection.
My performative video 1422 1829 1702 explores the memories associated with physical locations of my past, present and future. More specifically, I am utilizing feet (both figuratively and literally) as a unit of measurement to navigate through my grandmother's, my mother's, and then my own home. As I walk these homes, the floor plans become permanently ingrained in my memory, inch by inch, solidifying the connection between my family and I, no matter the distance. Each home segment can be seen as a parallel world to where I currently am and reminds me that my past and present will always be a part of me heading into the future.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, a new opportunity arose to transform this performance into a virtual, and even interactive performative work. Originally (pre- COVID), this piece was a performance for the camera, where I recorded and then edited the performances together, and displayed them as a projected single channel video. Since COVID, I have performed this piece 3 times on various virtual platforms for a number of festivals and exhibitions, from Instagram live to twitch, including the Bolivar Art Gallery at the University of Kentucky, Radiator Arts Gallery Virtual Performance series curated by Audra Lambert, and OUR Networks 2020 at the Toronto Media Arts Centre, Toronto, Canada (moved online). This piece also existed as a collaborative zoom performance for the BOND International Virtual Live Performance Festival (NYC and China), where I invited the viewers to also perform the measuring of their domestic spaces utilizing their feet, simultaneously.
ELIZABETH WITHSTANDLEY
A Brief History of Happiness
1 channel HD video
4 1/2 minutes
2018
A Brief History of Happiness is a one channel video that is comprised of sampled audio and video from YouTube. It is a 25 channel video composite of various musicians covering the song “Happiness” by Elliott Smith that is combined with audio excepts from motivational speeches and conversations about happiness. The video explores the similarities and differences of the performances while asking the viewer to think about “Happiness”.
YouTube has forever changed the landscape of media distribution by opening up the door for all to access, providing a platform for the everyday person to get their content out to millions of viewers. The first cover of the song “Happiness” was uploaded to YouTube on October 9th, 2006 about a year and a half after YouTube was launched. Since then there have been about 65 other covers of the song uploaded by various individuals from different parts of the globe. The video highlights content covering the past 12 years. The project speaks the idea of performance, fame, digital space, the line between professional and amateur while focusing on each individual performance.
Claudine Metrick,
A Melody from the Sky
Stop motion animation with sound
2021
Artist’s Statement
What if?... What if an egg birthed a cloud of smoke, or a flower petal became a butterfly? Until recently my artistic practice was centered around the static image - a painting or drawing painstakingly won through layers of mark or color. The need for play; the desire to transform a shape or to juxtapose two impossible images and tie them together in a story led me to experiment with stop motion animation. I am building short imaginations from the flotsam and jetsam I collected in my studio over the years. The videos explore my interest in the natural world found in much of my artwork, while opening the door wider for archetypal imagery and for a journey of some sort.
Wes Kline & Janelle Rebel
Humid Trance Distance
10:05 min.
2K digital video
2020
https://vimeo.com/488948424/2d063cd7a2
Artist’s Statement
How do you signal shifts in the experience of social space—physical and psychological, individual and communal--during a pandemic? Humid Trance Distance, a video performance project by Wes Kline and Janelle Rebel, is driven by an impulse to unpack the new anxiety of bodily proximity in public space as well as to cultivate episodes of distanced togetherness in their community in southwest Florida. The performances are scored, rehearsed, and improvised on location for two to infinity performers and utilize momentary gestures, found and simple constructed objects, cyclical actions, and spatial geometries. The project investigates ideas about the hyperlocal, productive affect, and dispersive technologies through abstract movements--face, sync, pass, waterfall, meet, revolve, and intersect.
McLean Fahnestock
Stratagem 12
High-definition video, silent
Continuous loop
2016
Artist Statement
We are directly connected to our world. Landscape and location shape our daily interactions. Those who venture to the edges of these are called adventurers, or explorers. I am interested in edges but even more so in the gaps that open inside our understanding. When we encounter a new place, we build knowledge of it through comparison to our prior experiences, generating a vocabulary of discovery through similarity and difference. That expressed newness can be exaggerated by desire or shaped by institutional knowledge, for good or ill. The challenges lie in understanding the separations that are present between the representations of place, the constructions of places in our mind, and visual perceptions of the visited location. Places are shifting with human driven changes to ecosystems. A chasm of perception is growing between our definition of a locale and the impacts of global climate change. Faced with mutability and mediation, I examine how location is experienced across time and romanticized through conflicting desires, the concept of paradise, and the intertwining of these ideas with our own perception of places and role in shaping them.
Anne Yoncha, with composer Shari Feldman & cellist Julia Marks
SUCCESSION: A VISUAL SCORE
Dye from locally-sourced cedar and Lake Ogallala water, graphite on paper, digital overlay of 2 minutes of MIDI biodata recorded from eastern red cedar (red) and mixed prairie grasses directly below its canopy (blue).
3’ x 4’
2019
Artist’s Statement
Because of increased human settlement and changes in fire regimes, eastern red cedar (though native) increasingly outcompetes mixed prairie grasses. Forest succession – shift from grassland t0 forest - poses a problem for species like the Sand Hill crane on its migration path. Succession depicts a series of mixed prairie grasses found on site at within the shape of one large cedar. I recorded two minutes of biodata of grasses (blue digital overlay) and cedar (red) from site, using a galvanometer sensor. The biodata is sonified with a multi-track cello recording.
My work explores the often-hidden mechanics of plant physiology, such as the tension that brings water up a Ponderosa pine against the force of gravity, or the coevolution of the Mucuna flower’s sound-reflective shape with its echo-locating bat pollinator. I use a combination of analog and digital processes, including textiles dyed with plant matter I collect, electronics controlling changes in light and sound, analog sensors transmitting data into exhibit spaces, and traditional drawing and painting techniques. I aim to create work that transforms microscopic or invisible processes into analogues viewers can experience in a tangible and visceral way. Perhaps engaging with these interpretations of plants as entities in dynamic relationships with their surroundings can contribute to our ability to think more critically about our capacity to both fit within and radically change our ecosystems.
Mariah Anne Johnson
7 Habitat Actions
Artist’s Statement
Since 2014 my practice has transformed from materially-intense, painterly installations in interior spaces to an open ended process in which my body is my primary tool for examining a landscape. Combining the observational focus of drawing with the site sensitivity of installation, I create movement works and works on paper that describe my intuitive understanding of a place, be it a wild mountainside, an urban sidewalk, or my own backyard. Moving and drawing have become the pillars that support my practice. These activities are modes of physical research, similar processes that utilize different parts of myself. Both involve careful looking and mental presence, both are physically active and accumulate over time. One describes space, while the other cuts through it. Each builds a body of knowledge, in the body. In this time of climate change, as our species faces the ramifications of our way of being, it feels essential to engage in this physical, deeply felt examination of my surroundings.
I bear witness to what we have before us. I watch it change and grow and give way over time.
Nancy Wyllie
Inquest
3:03
Artist’s Statement
In harvesting footage from a variety of sources over long periods of time, aspects of the slow reveal and parallel action are investigated. As I mine both public and private memory, I adhere to Jean Luc Godard's philosophy that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order. This best reflects my filmic approach to the nature of the human experience.
My goal is to connect the audience with the more private, undisclosed depths of our shared humanity by exploring the nature of the darkness and the light through which we all must pass. In 5 years my work will be readied for the expansion of existing platforms on which film can be
viewed. I remain committed to the short form and will make web series shorts that continue focus on the consequences of our actions.
Maryam Khaleghiyazdi
Morphing Shadow
2021
Artist’s Statement
Maryam is an Iranian multimedia artist and teacher based in Minnesota. Her work and teaching area cover different realms like digital art, illustration, augmented reality, animation, and graphic design. Currently, Maryam is exploring her identity as a person who has migrated from Iran to the United States. Indeed, she is applying illustration as a vehicle to expose her state as a person who lives between two different cultures.
"Morphing Shadow" is an animation about a girl who has moved from her country to another country. Whenever she gets bored and needs her family, she morphs her shadow into a box that contains her family members. She takes her family members from the box, communicates with them, turns them back to the box, and finally morphs the box into her shadow. There is a snake in some scenes that symbolizes dual feelings, happiness, and depression.
Peter Christenson
Deconstruction Via Train
https://vimeo.com/197714510/c7d7e2355f
Peter Christenson is a transdisciplinary artist working across new and antiquated media, psycho social sculpture, and immersive installation. He is co-founder of Left of Centre, a guerrilla-marketing firm and artist collective, the catalyst behind the interventionist collaborative Null Set, and Director of the Guest House Cultural Capital Residency scholar program. Christenson's intermedia practice and creative research continue to be significantly informed by his past experiences working as a social worker and licensed psychotherapist, often examining the complex sociopolitical, psychological, and cultural systems related to identity, place, and community.
Eddie Lohmeyer
Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #3
Found footage, NES games, machinima
Varied projection dimensions
2020
Artist’s Statement
Lohmeyer’s art explores the intersections among body and technology, particularly in how digital media opens participants to novel sensory and perceptual experiences. Through installation, sculpture, and video his media interventions reconsider our habitual encounters with technologies through new avenues of play and engaging with unfamiliar and uncanny interfaces. His works often upend and play with the media we have grown up around and have a nostalgic affinity for. The bizarre and playful encounters with these strange media unveil the normal attitudes and perceptions of technologies that have become a mundane extension of our bodies, while also questioning the knowledge frameworks through which we perceive and sense the world via media objects.
KATE NARTKER
Line by Line
Woven animation with sound
02:30
2012
https://www.katenartker.com/line-by-line
Artist’s Statement
I convert video into cloth, and cloth into video. I extend the logic of textiles to film by animating weavings frame by frame. The moving image is structured by a new woven system, and there is a loss of information as events are absorbed and overridden by material translations.
To create woven animations, I digitize films and render out a series of frozen stills. I weave the sequential images line by line on a Jacquard loom, creating lengths of cloth, which I then scan back into digital format. In the end, there is the physical weaving and a video piece. In this work, I am curious how cinematic techniques can be materialized physically to defamiliarize and transform an image. For example, when an image comes into focus, it is not through the turning of a lens, but through the surface and structure of the material itself. Behind all of my work is the tension between an image and the fiber it rests on, and the investigative act of deciphering, remembering, or coming to know something.
Jeana Eve Klein
Signaling
Digital Animation
34 seconds, continuous loop
2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xy4PT41I9Y
Artist’s Statement
I am thinking about social media: its effectiveness(-less) as an agent for change, as an imperfect archive of this particular moment in history, as an echo chamber for personal beliefs, as a magnifier of personal inadequacies, and as a vehicle for virtue-signaling. When life is mediated online, it is flattened and hyper-simplified. Every shared activity is met with the same limited menu of responses. How many hashtags add up to actual change?
Liam Ze’ev O’Connor
Hollow Land
SD Video, silent
2:01 min.
Artist’s Statement
Animation made from screenshots. 2016. “Hollow Land" is a black and white video created from screenshots sourced from a distorted PDF copy of Eyal Weizman’s book of the same name, which investigates the ways that the state of Israel employs architecture in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The screenshots are photos, diagrams, and maps, which show the present reality and speculative solutions to the occupation. The video loops these images so that they appear fragmented; collapsing the present moment with future plans and layered histories into flashes of an abstract landscape.
Zach Koch
Fires of Pompeii
2018
3D animation
2018
Artist’s Statement
Contemporary internet aesthetic data-bent with atmospheric obscurations and ornamental overlays are the foundations for my 2D, 3D, and 4D bodies of work. The nostalgic, consumerist inspired compositions are filtered through a lens of Romanticism in a way where they are represented in their most ideal state.
Since digital creations are virtually free from entropy, there is a timelessness to the
pieces because they don't age or degrade over time. They remain the same, locked in stasis in an endlessly looped gif or a meticulously hand-crafted oil painting. Each
piece is like the left-over evidence of a memory more complex than explanation, a
physical representation of an epitaph.
Jeremy Newman
Night’s Lace
2:27
2018
Silent
https://vimeo.com/287288449
Artist Statement:
In these videos, insects navigate their surroundings in the darkness. Interactions between insect and human are intimate, yet experienced through the lens. Separation exists despite proximity. By stylizing the encounters with video effects, the filmmaker intends for viewers to contemplate this dynamic.
nqma (Manol B. Gueorguiev & Adrian Anagnost)
Skins
http://nqma.site/skins/
aluminum mesh, drywall corners, plaster, headphones, voice recording
iPhone video; adapted from a play by Julian Sheppard
2018
Artist’s Statement
We are nqma, a collective of visual artists and art historians. Working in performance, sculpture, design, and installation, we explore translations of texts and images across media and cultural contexts. For the Rebecca Randall Bryan Art Gallery, we propose to exhibit to display an excerpt of our 2018 performance/video work, Skins.
Our works play with the monumental forms of historical authoritarianisms and the performativity of contemporary politics. In Skins, we used fragile and mutable sculptural forms as objects against which a performer asserts bodily presence, as a way to re-read a politically-cliched text in terms of interiority, self-doubt, and bodily instability. The full-length performance offers a new interpretation of a one-act play by a U.S. playwright, debating armed resistance. We created a series of wearable sculptures from plaster and wire mesh and collaborated with a writer to re imagine a clandestine meeting between armed guerrillas (one male, one female) as a solo dance monologue for video. Playing with and against the forms of our own sculptures, we worked with a solo performer to choreograph a set of iterative movements. The performer carried out the actions and recited our adapted script while listening to a recording of her own voice reading the same text. As the performer repeated her own words, her voice gained a sense of stuttered delay, implying audio from surveillance or a poor connection. Similarly, we adopted a low quality, poorly lit video to evoke surveillance as well as canonical 1970s video artworks.
Neil Horsky
Home Schlocking
Video
2018
https://vimeo.com/274113422
Artist’s Statement
Home Schlocking features a collection of ambiguous objects, on spectacular display and employed as tools for curiously unproductive tasks.
This “Art For Friends Sake” (AFFS) production stars Regina Peterson as host and hand model, and features Wes Buckley’s original musical score and Dada poetry.
Other AFFS productions with Peterson, Buckley, and the ambiguous objects include the experimental video and public performance art series, Voyeuges, the live gameshow, Name That Schlock, and the webcam show, Soundcrafting with Wes Buckley: Episode 7.
Home Schlocking is directed by AFFS Producer, Neil Horsky, a Boston-based artist, educator, musician and writer. View his work at horskyprojects.com.
Suzanne Gainer
The Storyteller
February 2021
ARTIST STATEMENT
Like many artists during the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself exploring alternative modes of making work, and uncovering latent themes. For the past decade or so, the focus of my work has alternated between straight-forward nature photography, and complex digital composite imagery dealing with political themes. However, back the 1990’s, as a graduate student at RISD, I was working with analog video and creating short films about the experiences of life in a family where abuse is the norm. Whether it was the time and space of the pandemic, or emerging prevalence of new digital forms of storytelling, I found myself working again in this mode. “The Storyteller” is a short, 5-minute, first-person narrative video story about love, loss, salvation and tragedy. It tells the story through the lens of family history, and touches upon themes of suicide, opioid use, what we know and what is hidden in the things we know and believe.