RPF Film Fest 2: We'll Try Harder This Time

Past Event at the Grand Central Art Center
04-8-03

RPF Film Fest 2: We'll Try Harder This Time

1.  Angel Chen, (Los Angeles, CA)
I can see for miles, some how I know (it wont last too long), Trt 03:30
Starring a white mouse undergoing the trauma of being trapped in a pool of honey and as he resigns himself to the situations, by praying, he sees his reflection in the golden pond, achieves enlightenment and ascends into psychic rebirth.

2. Mike Ott, (Valencia, CA)
PAT, Trt 06:00
A short documentary about an old man and his strange ideas about race, love and everything else in the world.  Shot on 16 mm.

3. Jaime Scholnick, (Los Angeles, CA)
Hello kitty gets a mouth, Trt 10:36
Mouthless, thus frustrated in her efforts to effectively use her Hello Kitty vibrator, our famous feline seeks, unsuccessfully to obtain one from 3 different Tokyo plastic surgeons.  They will only give her western eyes or bigger breasts.  After jetting to Beverly Hills and obtaining a the coveted orifice she returns to her Tokyo apartment to relish in her new found “voice.”

4. G Alan Rhodes, (Buffalo, NY)
Timecodes, Trt 04:20
A look at compulsive actions through the use of multi channel video originally from hand processed Super 8mm.

5.  Mike Williams, (Placentia, CA)
No Bull about It, Trt 01:40
And I like to drawr. 

6. Tim White Sobieski, (New York, NY)
Confession, Trt 16:00
War memories shown through the mind games of a young girl who is too young to bear the burden of guilt for all the wars.

7.  Terry Cuddy, (Buffalo, NY)
Resolutions , Trt 05:05
A two-part video-- a collision of photography, spoken word and player piano music.

 8.  Beau Jackson, (Alta Loma, CA)
The Dancer, trt 02:00
A short homage to the history of film and the Photo 11 class.

9. Eduardo Villacis, (Ecuador)
Director Fabio Ferro
Brote subversivo, Trt 08:00
A showdown between the machines and the trees.

10.  Dominic Delay, (Orange, CA), The sisters O’Malley, Trt 10:48
It’s thanksgiving.  Tempers flare.  The turkey is inedible.  There are bizarre happenings.  It takes a food fight to rediscover the power of the Sister O’ Malley.

11. Roman Deingruber, (Brooklyn, NY)
Illusion of reality
Trt 02:07
A short piece about elements of life, love, fear, reality, dreams.

12.  Leilani Lumen, (San Francisco, CA)
Letter to A.K., Trt 05:03
A young woman writes to a lover years after the end of their relationship.

13.  Eric Patrick, (Austin, TX)
Ablution, Trt 12:30
A film ritual in three acts.  Ablution traces a character’s dissociative journey through an archetypal cleansing.

Details: www.asuartmuseum.asu.edu/

6 Booths in 7 Weeks

Past Events at the Grand Central Art Center Project Room

6 Booths in 7 Weeks

April 5 - May 25, 2003

Check out our page at the Grand Central Art Center's website.

An ambitious project that features a new themed slate of short films each week, Six Booths in Seven Weeks spans the gamut of the video medium, presenting short experimental, documentary, animated, and narrative based works as well as advertisements and found footage. The heterogeneity of the exhibition illustrates video's impure, "promiscuous" origins. Significantly, several of the pieces address temporality, a quality that distinguishes video art and film from the other visual arts. By lengthening or looping time and by manipulating the conventions of storytelling, these pieces re-configure perception.

Thematic unity for the exhibit is achieved by the black box constructions in which the videos are screened. These constructions create darkened, intimate environments, which evoke the space of the confession, the home, and the voyeur. The single person booths privilege viewing as a private experience, emphasizing that spectators primarily watch video (television being the usual format), unlike film, individually or in intimate groups. Each video and spectator, thus, appears to be sealed off from the rest. However, outside of the booth/home, the videos act in conjunction to create a cacophony of sound and flickering images, emulating in their collage-like simultaneity the postmodern habit of channel surfing, the barrage of media information the average person negotiates daily, and the ever present humming of a collective--albeit, physically separated--audience for the endless stream of video produced by our culture.

As is fitting for Southern California, an advertising and consumerism mecca, one of the weeks is devoted to television ads. By explicitly crossing into the popular domain for this week, Six Booths in Seven Weeks blurs the boundary between video as art and video as disseminator of mass media message, thereby making the assertion that creative or innovative works can erupt through the cracks of the advertising industry. The inclusion of advertisements also gestures towards video art's continual association with its more popular sibling and art's struggle to critique the ways in which television mediates between the individual and society.