From: Marianna Ellenberg (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Nov 17 2006 - 00:46:09 PST
Hi Everyone, I will be presenting a video program in LA tomorrow night! Come check it out!
xMarianna
www.overtones.org
OVERTONES gallery is pleased to present a special video screening night on FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17th.
Doors will open at 7:30pm, screening begins at 8pm. Please RSVP to the gallery by November 16th.
OVERTONES gallery, 11306 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90066, Tel. 310. 915. 0346
http://www.overtones.org
“We are So Much Better Than This” (Performing the truth/Perusing a Lie)
Video Works by Tanja Dabo, Nir Evron, Marianna Ellenberg, Oriana Fox, Lala Rascic, Nisi Jacobs, Omer Krieger, Steve Reinke and Samuel Stevens.
Curated by Marianna Ellenberg
The video works in “We are So Much Better Than This—Performing the Truth/Perusing a Lie” subvert the symbiotic relationship between the script, the voice, its owner, and potential embodiment. A voice may be paired with a satirical double, as in Oriana Fox’s “Consciousness, Understanding N’ Trust” (2003), or constantly fail to synchronize, as in Lala Rascic’s “Sorry Wrong Number”(2005). Hovering between abstract images and spectral bodies, the voice is never stabilized in these works, it is either edited to the wrong sync point or created from a falsified script. This screening traces the breadth and variation of the video voice, including the queering of popular Americana In Steve Reinke’s “Anthology of American Folk Song” (2004), the replaying of counter-revolutionary voices in Hayes “SLA Screed 20” (2002) and exhausting the voice of cultural tourism in Dabo’s “Wellcomme”(2004). In contemporary globalized, americanized culture, individual voices get re-inhabited by media co!
nstructs; pop music, talk radio, television and internet sources. These artists question the various politicized/mediated voices that continually impact the body and its ontological essence. From the voice of cultural translation to the voice and the mediated image, these pieces each explore the phenomenology of the voice, and its various cinematic interventions. These artists utilize various techniques ranging from lipsynching to de-synchronization, to sift the authority of the disembodied voice, re-inhabiting it with freudian slips, miscalculations, polymorphous perversity and human desire.
++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++
List of Included Works:
Omer Krieger, FLAG (Israel, 2 min, 2003, video ) Produced by TV CHANNEL
An Israeli flag whose Star of David was scissored out, waves in the wind. A male and female voice are heard singing the Israeli national anthem in English, subtitled, and accompanied with acoustic guitar. FLAG is a call for a post-national Israel, offering up the possibility of deterritorialization in an age of growing nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Is the removal of the Star of David liberating or oppressing, and are there only two ways to look at this possible future? (-Omer Krieger, 2006)
Steve Reinke, Anthology of American Folk Song video (Canada, 29 min, 2004)
Anthology of American Folk Song retools Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music". Another twisted Reinke journey into American mythology and broken dreams, including masqueraded televangelists and ingenous reconfigurations of popular melodies from JLO to Patty Smith.
Marianna Ellenberg,The Psychotrophic Alphabet From Z to Z (or 21 Ways to Feel Good About Getting Better) Video (USA, 3 min, 2004)
Probing questions are culled from psycho-pharmaceutical websites and re-edited against the passive image of a woman endlessly drifting in a pastoral landscape. The trauma of a televisual consciousness, and the loss of a psychological self is echoed through the empty gaze of the patient, and the chilling authority of ‘neutral’ voice over.
Oriana Fox Consciousness, Understanding 'N Trust video (US/UK, 6 min, 2003)
Ventriloquism, lip-synching, and appropriation all play subversive roles in the post-feminist retro-spoof, Consciousness, Understanding ‘N Trust. In it I play a quirky cast of characters including Betty Crocker brunettes, soap-opera blondes, and air-head redheads as they become aware of their collective subjugation as women.
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screed No. 20 video (USA,15 min, 2004) is Sharon Hayes's talking-head re-creation of a video made by Patty Hearst and her captors after her kidnapping in 1974. She upbraids her parents for their wealth, accuses the American government of trying to kill her and declares solidarity with the revolution. (From a New York Times Review, January 2006)
Samuel Stevens, Esperi video (UK, 10 min, 2005)
Esperi is a documentary style video set in the Esperanto Society headquarters of Bialystok, Poland, the birthplace of the language. The film begins in un-subtitled Esperanto but quickly slips into Polish (with English subtitles) when the language reaches its' revelatory limit. This film traces the history of Esperanto from its creation through to it’s current status within the EU parliament where it is rivaled only by English as a bridging language between nations.
Tanja Dabo Wellcome video (Croatia,9 min, 2004) Incessantly repeating, almost to the point of choking, the phrase welcome in foreign languages addressed to all potential tourists for whom the country and its weakened economy crave, Tanja Dabo uses choking as a metaphor for the exhausting attempts to satisfy foreign interests.
Lala Rascic, Sorry Wrong Number video (Bosnia-Herzegovina, 15 min, 2006)
In this video, the artist acts out the famous 1943 radio play, muted. The words being spoken and the performer are purposefully out of sync, paralleling the miscommunication present in the narrative of the play itself. In the original play, the female victim overhears the plan for her own murder, but the inadequacy of the 911 operator, and the failures of modern communication leads to her demise.
Nisi Jacobs, From the Horses Mouth (I can produce-pronounce-nuclear) video (USA,11min,2005)
(I can produce-pronounce-nuclear) which is its generative motivating core, an unscripted moment during Laura Bush’s delivery of an entirely scripted stand-up comedy routine at the 2005 White House Correspondent’s Dinner in Washington D.C. The images contort and writhe through visually gagging effects intensifying the already-sick toxicity and hypocrisy which engulfs the room of 2,500 politicians, journalists, who are enjoying the manufactured wit on stage, simultaneously implicating themselves in the nation's crimes.
Nir Evron “One Forest” 16mm/video (Israel, 6 min, 2006)
One Forest was shot in the Bialowieza forest, which is the last remaining primeval forest, a unique ecological system that is 8000 years old. A site, in which mass execution of Jews and partisans took place under Hitler and the USSR was officially dispersed, the border between Poland and Belarus (the new EU eastern border) traverses this site. This forest exists at the juncture between nightmares of the past, a vision of an emmerging EU, and a limbo of a never-ending present.
++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++
http://www.overtones.org
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.