“The Man Who Waits and Sleeps While I Dream”

www.dreamlab.org

I became interested in exploring dreams as the primary material of all narrative structures — the first awkward stories we tell our own selves before our conscious selves can censor them.  Drawing on observation techniques from a 19th century sleep disorders clinic the work poses a charged but unexpressed intimacy between a professional observer and her sleeping charge.

A large video projection of an impossibly deep drain is surrounded by images, text, and sound. These elements tumble together in random sequences of narrative structure, and become source material for a kind of “conversation.” A voice-over soundtrack that can be heard through headphones accompanies the video excerpt.

Physically, the images are projected in different scales on all sides of the room. Psychologically, the projections are contained within the voice over as the observer projects her own thoughts and neuroses onto the sleeping subject. These projections can also be seen as metaphors for the exchange between artist and viewer; between separation and longing; between lovers; between the conscious and sub-conscious within ourselves. The viewer walks between the elements of the work, putting together a particular understanding based on the randomness of his own physical placement in the room. –– One has to be somewhere to be at all involved and so we bring to any story our own personal and cultural assumptions, interpreting not only the language of the narrative, but images and sensations as well. -Joey Morgan

www.sonjathomsen.com

Obscure is my understanding of oil, its origins; its raw potential; its economic, social and political relationships. What does oil look like? Diverse circumstances came together that made me curious about oil’s invisibility and ubiquitous influence in daily life. These circumstances climaxed in November of 2006 when a loved one returned home after his tour of duty in Iraq. At this time I began collecting my used motor oil and photographing it. By examining oil most immediate in our daily lives, the photographs make visible the slippery substance that has become as needed as water to sustain our contemporary lives.

Burning Water (2007) is a video completed in collaboration with a colleague and sound artist, Jason Nanna.  The four and a half minute video integrates my study of water, its elusive surface and potential, with my curiosity about oil–a complicated raw material that affects our economy and politics.

-Sonja Thomsen

“Choosing the Best Way”, “Doubting the Right Moment”, “Second Mistake”

www.amparosard.com/amparosard.html

In Amparo Sard’s latest video series water is the most important element, often coupled by an additional leit motif such as a carpet, a landscape, a flashlight, and a wooden raft. Sard uses her props symbolically.  For example, in one work, the carpet represents mistake, marking a difference between two worlds, or two options, the empty space and the filled space. 

Sard uses her familiar motif–the white dress–to represent subliminal language started in the Fly Woman series.  In the Fly Woman series Sard reflects on the doubt and anguish produced by indecision.  Through the work Sard speaks to the implication of mistakes, without revealing what the ultimate consequences may be.

Sard’s practice encompasses mixed media from video art and pin-hole drawings to full scale installation.  Sard’s artwork presents mysterious scenes focusing on a drowning woman and monstrous flies.

“Waterfall”

www.sadestudio.com

In Waterfall, Sadé presents 15 intimately scaled videos of running water.  She filmed the river from her train window, as she rode along New England’s waterways.  In the work Sadé turns the river’s horizontal orientation 90 degrees, shifting river’s axis vertically, and thereby abstracting the natural landscape.  The river’s motion and that of the train blur the images further.  The river cascades down the wall, rather than running along it, taking on the visual properties of a waterfall.  Sadé further stylizes the work through her use of artificial coloration, which visually references her larger body of work.

Regarding her oeuvre, Sade says:  My video stills arrest time and memory. My work aims toward a contemplation of time as a perfect metaphor for its own transcendence, which leaves us with a deepened awareness of our own motion toward mortality.In sets of stills taken from a video recorded on a train and car journey I resolve to remember as if the past were new, as if this journey remained a part of consciousness, as of course it does in our memory.

Through my visual studies I cultivate the thought that we never remain still because we are part of a flux that is omnipresent and affects all things, both the mind and the objects it is composed of.   Such a consciousness permits us to meditate on the cyclic nature of our own existence.  Art transforms what it is able to imagine. -Shuli Sade

“Reverence of Flow (in Motion)”

www.jaanikapeerna.net

Jaanika Peerna works at the crossroads of digital and traditional media, often dealing with the themes of water, simplicity and silence.
“I look for the universal beneath the particular and for the particular above the universal,” Peerna says.  “In my video work I point my camera towards carefully chosen ordinary phenomena such as water moving around a rock or a reflection on a car and record long takes without moving the camera in the hope that something essential about the subject matter reveals itself. I study the footage closely by slowing it way down and at times reversing it. I try looking at it upside down or sideways, all this in order to end up with a video which conveys something essential about the subject matter at hand. I am after the essence of things, the inner movement reflected in the outer motion. Often a small shift in how things are represented can bring a fresh and more immediate way to see and experience the ordinary things around us. I am interested in the never ending process of becoming with no story, no beginning, no end—just the current moment in flux.”

Reverence of Flow in Motion (2009) depicts a moving ball of water and light upon the screen. What is it?  A distant imaginary planet seen from outer space? A rushing stream viewed through a round hole in a log?  A synthetic fractal landscape?  None and all of the above, a work composed by the artist’s gaze in tandem with the transformative possibilities of the machine.  We tend to see only what our technologies offer to us, but sometimes, we peek through, past image and reflection, to some truer world beyond.

www.bigpaperairplane.com

Edwin’s Idea Farm is a cynical nod to the pitfalls of egotism. As the primary actor, I intentionally implicate myself in the verbal conflagration that my protagonist creates around himself. I mean to do this with a nod to Charlie Chaplain, who understood that idiocy is inevitable and our own role in it is assured.

-Ethan Murrow

Ethan Murrow received his B.A. from Carleton College and his M.F.A from The University of North Carolina. Based in New York City, he shows his work internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include, Winston Wachter in New York and Obsolete in Los Angeles. Ethan’s short film, “Dust,” was an official selection of the 2008 New York Film Festival. Ethan’s drawing, painting, video and film work is in many collections worldwide including the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition to joining the painting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in the fall of 2009, Ethan will also serve as the Dayton Hudson Distinguished Visiting Artist and Teacher at Carleton College in Minnesota.

“Seas” 

www.jennifermoller.com

The images used in Seas were presented to me on an extremely cold day walking along the Cape Cod bay. The sun was low in the sky raking the late afternoon light across the surface of the ocean. There was no saturated color; the scene was almost monochromatic. Broken chunks of ice formed along the shoreline extending 10 feet out to sea.  The beach was covered with large block shaped ice floats. The bay actually looked like a large white glistening slushy made up of crushed ice.

I noticed the extraordinary beauty of horizontal line, as the waves rhythmically rolled under the bulky ice. I watched as waves repeatedly cast their black linear shadows. I was entranced as I watched the movement’s repetition. I had a camcorder, a tripod, and some digital audio equipment with me. I attempted to capture what I was seeing and feeling that day. The wind was very cold and blowing hard.

Later, in the warm environment of my room I thought more about the wave experience and how it related to meditation. I had been exploring philosophical ideas about consciousness and I saw a connection with the form of the “wave” and the experience of human breathing. I was reading about brain wave states, specifically the theta states reached during meditation.

Presently, I perceive the ocean as a large sleeping form, a sentient being with the wave as its breath. It is in the wave or breath that transcendence seems possible because it may contain within it the mystery of consciousness. -Jenn Moller

www.susanjennings.com

www.slinkmoss.com

Susan Jennings’ abstract video work has long involved itself with the bare essentials of light, movement and color. She has turned to nature, specifically water, very often for her imagery. For this piece Jennings captures moving light on a river as a dance between figure and ground. This imagery is then projected onto whimsically moving sculptures which reflect and refract the video light and send it around the room onto the walls and sculptures as well as the viewers.

For the first time Jennings has collaborated with the artist, Slink Moss who created a sound piece in response to the visual art. His sound for this piece is also inspired by water and light. Drums and percussion represent drops of water or rays of light.  The field sounds Moss has captured of water, birds and trains are also percussive. In this way they relate to the visuals of the installation which deal with light as an object and, conversely, objects as light.

“The Flooded Rooms”

www.clarelangan.com

The Flooded Rooms explores the extreme forces of nature on mankind and it’s environments. This 4-minute film leads the viewer through a series of flooded rooms where it appears that nature has taken over the interiors created by mankind and claimed them as it’s own new landscape. Empty of their former inhabitants, their serenity seems almost normal.

Unlike Langan’s previous film work, which has always been shot in existing environments and landscapes, The Flooded Rooms is shot in created environments. These maquettes were built by the artist while doing a 2-month residency at Moly Sabata, on the Rhone, France from August – September 2005. The Flooded Rooms is inspired by the studio’s proximity to the river, but also mirrors Langan’s sand-filled rooms in her 2001 film Too Dark for Night. Langan’s familiar use of hand-painted glass filters used in front of the camera lens aid in blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal. The use of exaggerated slow motion in the film has an almost hypnotic quality with the moving water as well as the effect of extending time.

There has always been a crossover between photography, film and painting within Langan’s practice. The use of hand-painted filters and lens attachments employs a very site-specific approach, as well as an obvious reference to painting. Each shot in the film is taken through specifically fabricated hand painted filters, altering the image as it comes into the camera. Its is accompanied by an original score by Jurgen Simpson.

“Electric Sheep”

www.nevadaart.org/exhibitions/

Electric Sheep is a video installation that provides viewers with a unique audio-visual experience as they watch an octopus make its way through glass tubing. Under such close observation the octopus becomes oddly sensuous as it writhes and squeezes through the confined space. The image is both disturbing and beautiful, a sensation that is underscored by the accompanying soundtrack, Wrecking Ball by Emmylou Harris, in which romance and love are coupled with suggestions of fear and destruction.

Amy Globus debuted electric sheep as part of Future Noir a group exhibition organized by Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York, NY. The exhibition was inspired by Syd Mead’s set designs for Blade Runner.  Amy Globus derived the title for electric sheep from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 science fiction book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted into the science fiction cult film Blade Runner.

SELECTED BIOGRAPHY

Amy Globus received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York, New York and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. She was born in New York City in 1976 where she currently resides. Globus works with video and sculpture.

In 2003, she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship Award. Solo exhibitions of her work include Electronic Sheep at Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Sculpting in Time at D’Amelio Terras in New York, and Electric Sheep at The Nevada Museum of Art Media Gallery in Reno.

“Spiraling Water”

www.georgiefriedman.com/georgie_friedman.html

“Summer Solstice: 24 Hour Film”

www.jeffreyblondes.com

Jeffrey Blondes lives between Paris and the Loire Valley. His work explores the intersection of landscape and time – in particular the French word ‘temps’ with its numerous interpretations:  time, weather, season, beat, rhythm, speed, cycle, pulse. The length of his videos (i.e. 24 or 52 hours) provides a visual record of an experience in an isolated rural place in real time. The local sense of time is transported from the area into the viewing experience. The viewer is transported visually and temporally into a new conceptual space. Blondes’ is highlighting the function of landscape in art as a means of projection and escapism, creating a space between perception and experience. His films are presented vertically on the wall with a picture frame, so that at first glance they look like paintings.

Summer Solstice: 24 Hour Film is one 24 hour capture of the never-ending day from midnight June 21st to Midnight June 22nd in Tornehamn, a spit of land 200 km north of the Arctic Circle on Tornetrask, a large lake leading into Lapland on the Swedish-Norwegian border.