Maria Ezcurra, Passing (2022) is an installation of recovered and deconstructed shoes inviting viewers to navigate a space filled with bird silhouettes. Maria juxtaposes these comforting flying figures with deconstructed shoes to symbolize the resilience and vulnerability of migrant populations. Doing so, the artist highlights intricate connections between migration journeys and various aspects of life, including the environment, economy, society, and politics. (From the TBA website)Raven Chacon – Three Songs (2021) is a three-channel video installation that explores a history of Native resistance and questions the myth of an uninhabited American West. In the video, Indigenous women appear singing in their languages and playing instruments while they occupy historical sites of massacres, violence, and the forced displacement of tribal peoples. The work features Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington (Yuchi) and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole) who sung in their native tongue a history of resistance on the Trail of Tears, the Navajo Long Walk, and the forced expulsion of the Seminole. (From TBA website)
In Sonnet of Vermin, a legion of unwanted creatures related to the Mesoamerican underworld attempt to syntonize with one another and with the dead in the midst of a planetary cataclysm. The vermin are unspecific animals who are asociated with negative aspects, damage or destruction. A bat broadcasts frequencies from a tomb with the help of a funerary bundle/radio. A group of frogs/children are paranormal cyborgian amphibians who have adapted to toxicity and they demand another fix of cyanide. A twisted scorpion is a bad omen who claims for the right of infection. A snake sheds her skin while she announces the transformation of the cycles. A telluric alligator devours all what she finds on her way. A brigade of arms insists on raising from the earth. All of them seek for a subaltern solidarity and queer relationality as a form of re-existance within the ruins. (from the artist’s website)
Leila Zelli (@leila.zelli) is a Montreal-based artist born in Tehran whose work explores the relationship that we have with the ideas of “others” and “elsewhere” and, more specifically, within the geopolitical space often referred to by the questionable term “Middle East.” She creates in situ digital installations using existing images, videos, and texts often found on the Internet. With the resulting visual and sound experiences, she creates an opportunity for viewers to reflect on the state of the world, their relationship with the Other, and the actual effect of our actions on humanity. Leila will be presenting Pourquoi devrais-je m’arrêter ?(Why should I stop?) (2020-21), a video installation shown on two screens. The work pays tribute to the resilience of Iranian women who defy the ban on practicing Varzesh-e Bâstâni in public, a traditional form of athletics. (from the Toronto Biennial of Art)
REMINDERS – You should have your KM work with notes, your reading notes for the Poppilotti Rist article, and a short blog post describing some of the work you saw at the Field Trip.
Studio video recording for today’s groups
Discussions of footage, editing, and work in progress with Diane
Wednesday
*Final Cut Pro Editing demonstration with Nathan – bring your footage!
Work time in class
Consultations on editing*
*Show work in progress – I will be discussing with each group.
Meet Friday 9:30 at Bus Loop! See itinerary for details
*Reading notes due on blog
Sal and Ava – 2023
Assignment: One Feat, Three Ways video project
Video Art: One FEAT, Three Ways*
You will work with a partner to make three videos less than 2-minutes each in length each.
Your videos should be shot at the studio in controlled, illuminated conditions.
Pick your FEAT. You will repeat variations on your “FEAT” in each video below.
Your FEAT should be an everyday gesture or activity that you can push to its limits. Push yourself to your limits. Push a material to its limits. Do not take ANY risks with your safety – subtle, quiet, funny risks are better and more interesting anyway. Just watching someone smiling as long as they can as hard as you can is fascinating and even painful to watch for its duration.
Examples of gestures from past students include: Eating something, Juggling, Kissing, Blowing up a Balloon, Smiling, Holding an Awkward Pose, Reaching for Things out of Reach… etc.
It might be an absurd thing – something pointless, or an impossible feat that you can’t actually do
The object is to try to do the thing, not to “act” – and what happens… happens!
You, your partner, or someone else may perform. Maintain your concentration and explore how a simple gesture becomes interesting when performed with commitment and intention.
NOTE: Add a title to each video, and videos should be approximately 1-2 minutes in length.
Video #1: The One-Shot
The video will consist of “one shot” – there will be no editing, other than a black screen to mark the beginning and end of the video. You may focus on camera function, unusual points of view, and framing. You will also add titles and end credits to your videos.
Video #2: The Sequence
The object of this video exercise is to shoot a series of shots with the intention to edit them into a sequence. It may require 5 minutes, an hour, a day, or a week, and you can show it in a series of stills or a time lapse. Edit your footage to be less than two minutes.
Video #3: The Loop
The object of this video exercise is to create a video that is meant to be played over and over again indefinitely, without stopping. Consider the content of the video when you are shooting your feat, and use looping to complete the meaning of the work. Don’t make a short GIF type video – think of a longer loop – something that could play in a gallery on repeat without end.
Edit your loop footage to be less than 2 minutes long, and then play on a loop for the critique.
Videos will be graded by the degree to which students demonstrate:
Understanding of the key concepts in the assignment
Clarity and originality of ideas
Investment of time and contributions to the group
Focus in performance and intentionality about everything in the frame
Technical success using lighting and professional camera equipment in works, and technical success using editing software and exporting gallery-quality video
Presentation and openness to feedback during critique
Students are also expected to post a final work (including any revisions after critique) to the class blog with a title, artist names, and a short description of the work within ONE WEEK of the critique for final marks.
Videos will not receive a grade until a work is posted on the class blog.
Video Artist references:
Yoko Ono
Bruce Nauman
Adrian Piper
Pipilotti Rist
Michelle Pearson Clarke
Lee Walton
William Wegman
Jon Sasaki
Camille Turner
Marina Abramovic
Kelly Mark
Euan MacDonald
Wood and Harrison
Erwin Wurm
Maria Hupfield
Student examples
**Be safe and respectful to yourself and others at all times! Talk with me if you have any questions about your project. Never perform unsafe activities for your projects in this or any class in Studio Art.
Describe the habitual movements/unconscious gestures, tics etc. of 3 people you know well. How do individual body parts move, and how does the whole body interact? What about facial expressions, and emotional valence of the movement? How does body type inform the movement?
WARM UP EXERCISE all together – breathing, bouncing on knees, shaking it out, breathing together.
Teach your partner one of the choreographies. Rehearse, and record 30 seconds of video of each performance.
CHANGE PARTNERS. Repeat – Teach another partner another choreography. Rehearse, and record 30 seconds of video of each performance.
CHANGE PARTNERS. Repeat – Teach another partner another choreography. Rehearse, and record 30 seconds of video of each performance.
At the end, you should have three, 30-second videos of other students performing an archive of movements. Use this footage for your editing workshop.
WEDNESDAY
Field Trip Reminders: Make a short blog post describing and reflecting on TWO artworks you were interested in from the field trip including images. Please pay for your trip on the Field Trip Eventbrite Link.
More examples of student videos:
(SEE DESKTOP for 1 minute examples – lemons, hugging, denim…)
Create a short blog post responding to the reading, and reflecting on these questions:
Post an image from one of Rist’s videos that you are most interested in. Summarize the action of the video. Who is performing, and how? Describe the images – including framing, colours, and movement. How did she shoot and edit the video? Describe the sound and how it interacts/enhances/competes with the images. How is it installed in a gallery – in terms of projection/scale/presentation in a context of other things? How does the work strike you?
Rist has had a long career in video art making – how do you relate it to the kinds of video that you might see all the time on Tik Tok or You Tube, in our time? Reflect on her performances and also – on her ideas (particularly about women’s bodies, and sexuality, exposure, behaving strangely or subversively…) and how they play out from examples in her works.
Experiment: While still at school – put on your sweater/shirt INSIDE OUT. How does this change how you feel? Is it changing how other’s are treating you? If you can wear your sweater/shirt inside out all day – make a few notes about the results of this very small change in your presentation in public. Is this a performance? Why?
Bring in a KILOMETRE to show the class and discuss next week.
Document a kilometre. Walk it. Sculpt it. Talk it. Write it. Draw it. Video record it. Perform it. Get your mom to perform it. Conjure a kilometre in any media.
It could be a walk down the street, a path down an intestine, a line going up into the air, a kilometre’s worth of rocks. It can be a kilometre made of chewing gum. Made of telephone conversations. Made of complaints. Made of a walk with a cat. Made with light. It can be a distance between two points. It can be imagined, traced, documented, listed, performed, evidenced on the bottom of your shoe, rolled up into a ball.
Make sure to measure your kilometre in some way, and be prepared to discuss your process, and justify how it is precisely a kilometre.
Consider your materials, and just how your specific kilometre gives us a new way to think about or experience this abstract concept of measurement.
You have up to 5 minutes next week to present your kilometre to the class.
Bring it, or show us documentation of it.
IT MUST BE PRECISELY A KILOMETRE – EXPLAIN HOW YOU KNOW IT IS ONE.
“Seductive, fearless, and outrageous, Marina Abramovic has been redefining what art is for nearly 40 years. Using her own body as a vehicle, pushing herself beyond her limits and at times risking her life in the process she creates performances that challenge, shock, and move us.
This film follows Marina as she prepares for what may be the most important moment of her life: a major new retrospective of her work, taking place at The Museum of Modern Art. To be given a retrospective at one of the world’s premier museums is the most exhilarating sort of milestone. For Marina, it is far more: it is the chance to finally silence the question she has been hearing over and over again for four decades: But why is this art?”( From Film Summary)
Questions for discussion:
What are some of your first impressions of Marina Abramovic’s performance works, based on the documentary? Use an image/example of one or two works2. to describe aspects you admire, and aspects you might agree are problematic?
What have you learned about features of performance art based on Abramovic’s work? Name a few key features according to her precedents. Include an image to illustrate. Consider her quote “When you perform it is a knife and your blood, when you act it is a fake knife and ketchup.”
Discuss the ways performance art resists many museum and commercial artworld conventions. How does Abramovic solve/negotiate some of these challenges, and do you find these compromises add to, or undermine the ideas at play in her work?
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