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INFO
JULY 14, 2009, 8pm - One Night Only
three imitations & one impression - curated by David Kelley
De Soto Gallery is pleased to present an evening of new video works curated by David Kelley. The four video works in this screening are situated on the border between experimental video installation and self-reflexive, documentary film practices. They share operations of re-performance, re-assemblage, and re-consideration of film, media and cultural materials - not out of nostalgia, but rather as a means of performing the present, in light of what's passed.
The first two videos in the program deal with language and image, and their slippery role in the narrativization of identity and memory. Both Michelle Dizon's video "Civil Society(I)" and Hong-An Truong's video "A Measure of Remorse" consider language's role in the manifestation of state power and the potential formation of resistant identities. Dizon's three-channel video considers acts of civil unrest that occurred in LosAngeles in 1992 and Paris in 2005. A panorama of archival news footage, original photographs, video, text, and narration, "Civil Society(I)" opens a space for a personal response to violence. Truong's "A Measure of Remorse" stages an alternative outcome to a heated conversation between Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking and Japanese Ambassador Kunihiko Saito regarding Japan's refusal to claim responsibility for the atrocities commited against the Chinese in WW II. "A Measure of Remorse" employs physical gestures, gazes and stillness as counter-performances to the politics of rhetoric.
The final two videos in the evening's program enact re-performance of film and historic events. Ming Wong's "Angst Essen/Eat Fear" and David Kelley's "Gold Standard" use constructs of race and performance to consider notions of otherness. An essential component of these reconstructions is a self-reflexive gesture that exposes the act of representing the 'other' as the heart of each of their artistic practices. In "Angst Essen/Eat Fear", Wong plays all the roles in this classic Fassbinder film about prejudice toward a Moroccan immigrant's romance with an elderly German widow. By playing all the protagonists in a completely unfamiliar language, Ming turns each one into an ‘other’ or a ‘stranger’. Kelley's "Gold Standard" re-stages an infamous interview during which Robert Rauschenberg ignored all the questions of his 1964 Tokyo audience. Drawing upon archival photographs and accounts of the interview, Kelley re-imagines the event with a Japanese modern dancer pantomiming the painter's performance.
JULY - 25, 8pm - One Night Only
JUST ADD WATER - curated by Pascual Sisto
Just Add Water is a collection of videos from an international group of artists that utilize similar techniques and processes for completely different outcomes. With sources originating from digital readymades or appropriated video, each artist modifies, redirects and redistributes the footage using a wide array of alterations, from simple editing to more detailed and complex reconstructions. The digital realm casts a dark shadow over the initial intent of images and our preconceptions of their meaning and usage into a new alternative mode of existence where the source becomes either a catalyst or an added layer of a whole new work. Warning: Some works contain pornographic imagery.
Works by: AIDS-3, Chris Collins, Aleksandra Domanovic, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaar, Jasper Elings, Martijn Hendriks, Oliver Laric, Guthrie Lonergan, Takeshi Murata, Seth Price, Fernando Sanchez, Damon Zucconi