Video Mundi Program 1
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT REVOLUTION
Curated by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper
Battersby Sponsored by the Consulate of Canada
Tuesday, April 20 6:30pm at the Chicago Cultural
Center
Saturday, April 24 5:30pm at Heaven Gallery
"Good Luck with that Revolution brings together works that present various blueprints for radical change, whether it be political, psychological, spiritual or aesthetic. What each of these model for insurgency shares in common is a kind of charming pathos‹each piece describes a splendid and ambitious arc toward the same bright red bulls-eye: failure." –Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
Sally Rubin
Body Politics, 2003, 9 min. 20 sec.
On April 19th, 2003, over two-hundred couples–lesbian,
gay, and straight–converged on San Francisco's Baker Beach to protest
the war in Iraq by spelling out "Make Love Not War" with their nude bodies
on the sand. What originally began in Marin County, California as a small
but powerful anti-war movement has now reached the furthest corners of
the world, and has women and men everywhere stripping off their clothes
for peace. Sally Rubin is from Boston and is currently working on a film
about her family's journey to unravel the mystery behind the psychology
and circumstances of her father's death in a hiking accident.
Jack Sloss
PE, 2002, 1min. 57 sec.
PE is a succinct comment on the culture of sampling
and cultural appropriation. Jack Sloss received his BFA from Tyler School
of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia in 1998 and his MFA from the University
of Illinois at Chicago in 2002.
Evan Godfrey
Welcome to Freedom Street, 2003, 12 min.
Canada. Welcome to Freedom Street chronicles the engagingly
expressed political idealism of homeless person Marc Nault. Marc's ambitious
plans to become emperor of the world are contextualized by the harsh reality
of homeless life and drug addiction. The audience is left to determine
the authenticity and feasibility of Marc's political platform.
Calgary born Evan Godfrey was raised in Saudi Arabia and spent high school in the United Arab Emirates. After graduating with an English Major from Mount Allison University in the Maritimes, Evan moved back to Calgary to begin working as a Production Assistant.
Meesoo Lee
Manifesto, 2001, 21 sec.
You are either with us, or against us. Meesoo Lee has
been stuck in Vancouver, BC since 1995 and is up to his neck in credit
card debt. He is currently trying to reconcile his formative experiences
with television and pornography with his video art "practice."
Paul Lloyd Sargent
White Blight Manifesto, 2003, 6 min.
White Blight Manifesto is a tongue-in-check hip hop
music video rapped by Simple Text's Fred over kinetic images of Chicago's
Humboldt Park neighborhood. A modest proposal style argument with the
perfect answer to white male existentialist angst. WBM is a ridiculous
manifesto about suburban kids moving to the city, white guilt, and suicide
solution. Paul Lloyd Sargent is an artist living and working in Chicago,
IL. He teaches video and digital imaging at a number of institutions around
Chicago. And by mid-Chicago-winter, he enjoys a good cup of white hot
chocolate, where ever he can find it. Sex and Cerebral Palsy.
Linda Feesey
Sex & Cerebral Palsy, 2003, 12 min.
Sex & Cerebral Palsy is a short pornographic documentary
in which Feesey talks to disabled people about their attitudes towards
sex and documents sexual encounters between two disabled couples.
"Feesey takes the in-your-face mentality of the American underground
movement and Cinema of Transgression, adds two parts introspection and
one part painful honesty, with exploitation aimed squarely at the self.
Her innovative use of double exposures, blurring frames and aggressive
soundtracks bleed together with images of self-mutilation, guns, knives,
and drug overdoses to create intensely personal, unrestrained and steadily
aggressive works of pain and assault." – Alex MacKenzie, The
Blinding Light!! Vancouver BC. Feesey is a film programmer and documentary
maker living and working in Toronto, Canada. Her previous film was a 35
minute drama, Mr. Kafka's Holiday.
Corwyn Lund
Swingsite, 2003, 1 min. 20 sec.
"Corwyn Lund's video Swingsite reveals the lengths
an urban soul will go to to find a little release amid the pigeon droppings
and recycling bins. The tape shows the artist entering a very tight alleyway
between two brick downtown buildings, scaling the space between them with
the deftness of a rock climber and installing a swing, which he suspended
from a temporary metal bracket. Lund then climbs down and sets about swinging,
flying forward and back in the narrow space, and we feel his zoom and
fall, zoom and fall. Lund's approach? You work with what you've got, and
you make it fly. (Let that be a lesson to us all!)" –Sarah Milroy,
Thursday, September 11, 2003 The Globe & Mail
Jennifer Montgomery
Threads of Belonging, 2003, 10 min. (excerpt)
Threads of Belonging is a feature-length experimental
video by Milwaukee-based filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery (Art for Teachers
of Children, 1995). It is based on the work of R.D. Laing, a British psychiatrist
who founded a therapeutic community in which the hierarchical distinction
between physicians and patients was essentially eliminated. What really
sets the work apart is that, unlike so much contemporary art, Threads
of Belonging doesn't just gesture obliquely toward interesting "issues"
or "themes". Montgomery has created actual experiences of the
theories and dynamics with which she is concerned, both in life, by staging
the two-week long, spiritual-retreat style shoot; and in representation,
by painstakingly distilling the 80 hours of footage to a succinct, emotionally
compelling ninety minute feature.
Juli Kang
The Liberation of Everyday Life, 16 min.
With The Liberation of Everyday Life, Juli Kang set
out to make a film about the revolutionary potential of Los Angeles. Her
first film Princess Fever, explored a teenager's feelings toward her immigrant
parents and played at several festivals. She was the director of photography
on several films, including an omnibus short film set in Rimini, Italy,
and a documentary about the impact of globalization on Honduras. She is
now working on completing Lee's Market, a documentary about a small convenience
store in Santa Ana, a working class neighborhood in Orange County, as
she finishes up her MFA at UCLA in film directing. She was a history major
with a concentration in European Imperialism in the Third World as an
undergrad at Wesleyan University.
Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton British Columbia, Canada) and Emily Vey Duke (b. 1972, Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada) have been working collaboratively since June 1994. They work in printed matter, installation, curation and sound, but their primary practice is the production of single-channel video. Their work has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals in North and South America and throughout Europe, including the Walker Center (Minneapolis), The Banff Centre (Banff), The Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), YYZ (Toronto), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), The New York Video Festival (NYC), The European Media Arts Festival (Osnabruck), Impakt (Utrecht) and The Images Festival (Toronto). Their tape Being Fucked Up (2000) has been awarded prizes from film festivals in Switzerland, Germany and the USA. Bad Ideas for Paradise (2002) was purchased for broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and for the libraries at Harvard and Princeton, and has won prizes from the NYExpo (NYC)and the Onion City festival (Chicago).
Emily Vey Duke received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and has just completed her Masters at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was awarded the campus-wide University Fellowship. Cooper Battersby received his diploma in computer programming at Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC. He was the recipient of a Canada Council Production Grant in 2001, and will complete his MFA at University of Illinois, Chicago this spring.