 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||
| current issue | subscribe | editions | projects | join | contact | area | symposium | publications |  |
|||
 |
 |
|
 |
|||||||||
 |
||||||||||||
ABOUT THE ARTISTS and VOOM's CURRENT PRODUCTIONS – 2006
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Tension Building “I want to draw an analogy between the Harvard Coliseum's simple architectural design and it's origins, a concrete mixer.” - Ericka Beckman The Tension Building is a short stop motion animation experiment shot at the Harvard University Coliseum in winter 2006. The building is a classic 1920 stadium built to house field sports. It is an unpainted poured concrete structure standing in a field of green grass. The seating is part of the poured structure, coded with solid block letters and numbers. Through her stop motion technique, Beckman turns the structure into a spinning, thrashing machine. The work is part of an continuing time-based media project where she turns various architectural sites into motion machines with adjustments in lens framing, exposure variations and camera movement. The design of the space dictates the animation design. All of Beckman's films have games and role playing at their core. Hiatus is her current game construct, combining animation and in-camera effects with a contemporary "strung out on the Net" story. She is well known for her experimental films from the 1980s, such as Switch Center, Blind Country and Cinderella. She has shown extensively in museums and festivals such as MoMA, Walker Arts Center, Musee D'Orsay, Black Maria Film Festival, Shanghai Duolon Museum of Modern Art. Her films are in the collection of Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center. She has received numerous grants from LEF Foundation, Moving Image Fund, Creative Contact Grant, Harvest Works, New York, NEA, NYSCA, and several other organizations. ______________________________________________________________________ Portrait of Shanghai I visited Shanghai in December of 2002. At the time, I was struck by the rapid development of this incredible city. As neon lights laced the highways and foreign stores pollinated the streets, fear and anxiety veiled my impression. Reminiscing China's culture and history, I gazed at the remnants of the old landscape in the hopes of understanding the contrast of its escalating urban environment. In a search to reveal the old vs. new, Portrait of Shanghai is an unresolved meditation on the globalization of this progressive 21st Century city. Lili Chin is an emerging artist based in New York City. Her films manipulate the traits of Super 8 and 16mm film to convey a sense of nostalgia and expose the medium in new technologies. Gathering footage as archival material, she retraces her travels to collage imagery and sound into peculiar and uncanny environments. Extracting metaphors out of unusual elements, she maps the elliptical cycle of rebirth in the early 21st Century. In an ongoing search to find order out of chaos, she is pursuing installation work to expand her artistic practice. She is an Alumni of Pratt Institute and has exhibited in venues such as Dumbo Arts Collective, Participant Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Monkey Town, Digital Art Oxford and Enview Gallery. She is the Artist Outreach producer at Voom HD Lab and on the Board of Directors of the Filmmaker's Coop. Rite of the Black Sun 1) The concept of form and content at one and the same time, a notion perhaps best related to music. It is here demonstrates a pure optical phenomena. An artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, expanded cinema & installation. Also a maverick curator, designer, researcher & investigator. Exhibited at 2004 Whitney Biennial & The American Century, The New York Film Festival, London Film Festival, MoMA, Pacific Film Archives; and directs the Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema. ______________________________________________________________________
About Ali Hossaini As a filmmaker and scholar, Ali Hossaini has worked on the cutting edge of media for many years. He developed Voom HD Lab, a program that produces experimental films in high-definition format. He has commissioned projects from Robert Wilson, Tony Oursler and many other artists, and his productions include performances by Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey, Jr, Princess Caroline, Sean Penn, Isabella Rossellini, Juliette Binoche and other cultural icons. Work from Voom HD Lab has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2006), the Tribeca Film Festival (2006), P.S. 1-MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the American Museum of the Moving Image and private galleries.
An artist of multiple disciplines, Gregory King has a BFA in printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute, and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. He has exhibited his work in numerous galleries, museums, universities, and film festivals across the country, notably the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, the Edinburgh and Ann Arbor Film Festivals, and the Rooftop Films Summer Series in Brooklyn. He has won several grants and fellowships, such as an Arts Midwest/NEA Regional Art Fellowship, a Mustard Seed Foundation Harvey Fellowship, and a Jerome Foundation Media Arts Program Grant. ______________________________________________________________________ Michoacan: La Muerta Michoacan: El Traidor Sabine Gruffat is a media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her films and videos have screened at several microcinema venues/ galleries including AS220, the PDX Film Festival, Discount Cinema, The Ice Factory, Hull Screen U.K, The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago Filmmakers and the Gramercy Theater. Her photographs and video installations have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Art In General, the Rochester Art Center and the Centro Cultural Telemar in Brazil. This summer she will be showing at Brissot-Linz Gallery in Paris, France. About Ben Russell Ben Russell is a Providence-based experimental film/videomaker whose works have screened at the Museum of Modern Art and in such exotic locales as Tokyo, Cologne, Rotterdam, and Iowa City. Ben runs a microcinema called Magic Lantern, and he has made films about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the exploration of Easter Island, and the end of the world. His most recent film is an hour-long narrative about the uncertain mythology of Billy the Kid. Sahara Mojave The World Turns Leslie Thornton was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. She studied with filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Stan Brakhage and Richard Leacock. Her numerous awards include the Maya Deren Lifetime Achievement Award, the first Alpert Award in the Arts for media and grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, and The Jerome Foundation. Thornton's film and media works have been exhibited worldwide, in such venues as The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Centre George Pompidou, Musée Bordeaux and The Pacific Film Archives. Festivals include The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The New York Film Festival and the film festivals of Oberhausen, Graz, Mannheim, Berlin, Austin, Toronto, Tokyo and Seoul. Thornton is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. ______________________________________________________________________
Gail Vachon, a filmmaker for over 35 years, also draws pictures and was a member of the band Y Pants. Her films have been shown extensively and were included in the traveling show 10 Years: Collective for Living Cinema and in Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films at the Museum of Modern Art. Her video Not Nine was screened at the 2005 New York Film Festival. ______________________________________________________________________ Grahame Weinbren, 2006 Grahame Weinbren has made moving image works and interactive cinema installations for over 30 years. Since 1984, Weinbren has created interactive cinema installations, which have shown internationally. His collaboration on The Erl King with Roberta Friedman was one of the first works to combine interactivity with cinema and was recently acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. His high definition short film collection 25 Letters was exhibited in the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is an editor of Millennium Film Journal. Meredith Salient Field Theo Angell is a video artist and musician based in New York City. A former member of the band Hall of Fame, his music has been heard nationwide. His video works have exhibited in international venues such as the Istanbul Biennale, Frieze Art Fair, Daniel Reich Gallery, Monkey Town, Disjecta Gallery, Instants Chavires, Guggenheim Museum and several others. He was recently at Caldera Residency in Oregon and is current resident at Voom HD Lab. He is working on a new series about spirituality, trees and graffiti. ______________________________________________________________________
Toni Dove works primarily with electronic media, including virtual reality, interactive video installations, performance and DVDs that engage viewers in responsive environments. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe and Canada. Projects include Arxheology of a Mother Tongue, a virtual reality installation with Michael Mackenzie, Banff Centre for the Arts and an interactive movie installation, Artificial Changelings, which debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was exhibited at Body Mécanique at the Wexner Center and other spaces. Her current project under development is Spectropia, a feature length interactive movie for two players. Dove has received numerous grants and awards including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The LEF Foundation, and the Eugene McDermott Award from M.I.T.
Pawel Wojtasik's critical, and at points documentary-style video work foregrounds the means by which material waste, including that produced by the human body, is processed and eliminated. A culture of increasingly rapid consumption does not often permit glimpses into how its refuse is handled. Visceral experiences of these activities are scarce. Wojtasik takes us behind the scenes with results beautiful and horrific. Wojtasik has chronicled waste treatment methods at such diverse locations as a supermarket, a garbage transfer station, a car junkyard, and an individual's home. Employing slow-motion imagery and ambient sound, each piece reveals an open-ended narrative that encourages inquiry into what these processes mean. Wojtasik has exhibited in venues such as San Francisco Cinematheque, Exit Art, Art Basel, PS1, Alona Kagan Gallery, Westport Art Center, LOOP Fair, Momenta Gallery, F-18, Kunstencentrum Netwerk and Reina Sofia in Spain. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TRANS< copyright 2003 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
