Janet Wondra and Jeff Walker


Artists' biographies

Janet Wondra is a filmmaker, videomaker, and performance poet. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals such as Southern Review, Exquisite Corpse, Witness, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and she co-authored Emerging Island Cultures and The Wandering Mother.

Before turning to video, Jeff Walker was a visual artist, exhibiting his paintings and sculpture extensively throughout the country. He was also a founding member of the San Francisco-based performance group Aesthet-O-Rama, which combined magic, video, and circus skills.

Wondra and Walker have been working together in video and film since 1989. Their collaborative and individual video work has been shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival (California), the New Orleans Film and Video Festival, the New York Expo of Short Film and Video, the European Media Art Festival (Germany), and VideoFest Berlin, among other places. They have been awarded artist fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center (New York), the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences (Georgia), Yaddo (New York), and the Art Matters Foundation (New York).


Notes to Self

Notes to Self

Written and directed by Jeff Walker

Musical score by Klimchak
Camera by Jeff Walker
Performances by George Jones, Glynnis Weston, and Sergei Hryn
Edited by Jeff Walker

Experimental narrative video
Running time 16 min 28 sec
Completed 1995

"Notes to Self" is a spy story shot in Pixelvision. It involves a former CIA case officer living in semi-retirement in Port Allen, Louisiana. The Company keeps him on partial payroll in exchange for his performing what they perceive as an unimportant duty: keeping track of the comings and goings of commercial Russian freighters that dock in Port Allen. This stable situation is aggravated by his contact at the CIA, a young, female administrative assistant named Sydney. Her well-meaning encouragement of the Spy in his surveillance eventually leads to his going too far and running into trouble with the law.

The camera used in production was a Fisher-Price PXL 2000, originally introduced as a toy video camera. Normally, Pixelvision records video and audio to a standard audio cassette, but for "Notes to Self," the audio tape was bypassed and the signal recorded to Hi-8, then posted to Beta-SP.

"Notes to Self" was funded by a grant from the Art Matters Foundation, New York.


Bearer of the Wound

Bearer of the Wound

Written and directed by Jeff Walker

Voice by Janet Wondra
Percussion by Klimchak
Camera by Jeff Walker
Performance by Elizabeth Lee Busbin
Edited by Jeff Walker

Experimental video
Running time 9 min 44 sec
Completed 1994

"Bearer of the Wound" is a story told in voiceover by a female friend of the protagonist. The piece describes the adventures of a young woman who has the ability to travel freely in time, an ability given to her at an early age by extraterrestrial visitors. In the end, her alien benefactors withdraw her powers and, seeing that she is no longer able to live happily in the world, return and remove her permanently to their own planet.

Although the story contains many classic science fiction elements, the elements are used much in the same way that "found poetry" or collage makes use of whatever subject matter may be at hand: plot elements comprise the video's overt form but not necessarily its underlying psychological content. The traditional science fiction plot line is further undercut through the voice of the narrator. Even as she relates terrifying and absurd events--alien abduction, mind alteration, time travel, and bodily possession--she does so in an offhand and somewhat disinterested manner, often upstaging the subject's adventures with stories of her own past lives as told to her by her psychic.

"Bearer of the Wound" was written and shot during an artist's residency at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Rabun Gap, Georgia.


Tall Tale

Tall Tale

Written and directed by Jeff Walker

Performed and narrated by Jeff Walker
Camera by Keith Crews and Jeff Walker
Edited by Jeff Walker

Experimental video
Running time 4 min 0 sec
Completed 1994

"Tall Tale" is a darkly poetic and humorously symbolic piece following the grand tradition of cowboy monologue in which the director/narrator accompanies his story with rope tricks, à la Will Rogers. Walker relates a dream in which a middle-aged married couple find an entrance into hell in their basement and eventually join each other in blissful, demonic possession. In this performance narration, the rope "spins" the tale, acting as both a storytelling aid and a somewhat forced contrivance, simultaneously facilitating and undercutting the narration.

"Tall Tale" was funded by a 1992 Equipment Access Grant from the New Orleans Video Access Center.


Uncool Orbit

Written and directed by Janet Wondra and Jeff Walker

Lead performances by Josh Russell and Laura Rosenthal
Musical score written and performed by Wayne Wilson
Camera by Jeff Walker and Janet Wondra
Editing by Janet Wondra and Jeff Walker

Narrative video
Running time 51 min 0 sec
Completed 1993

"Uncool Orbit" is a science fiction video about Louisiana politics. The story is this: Josh, an amateur photographer who lives in Baton Rouge and works in telephone sales, is mentally assaulted by extraterrestrials. During the assaults, political, economic, and racial problems disappear and are replaced by bland, unthreatening visions. Sometimes the assaults cause him to talk backwards or develop unnatural appetites. Eventually, he is contacted by Myra, who acquires a shielding device for Josh which will protect him from alien transmissions. Together they fight the extraterrestrials, with startling results.

In their video, Walker and Wondra created a sympathetic yet critical portrait of their adopted home, Louisiana. Visual evidence of Louisiana's ailing economy coupled with the story's theme of alien invasion and abduction provide insight into some tendencies of the state's dominant culture: distrust of outsiders and people of color, the use of fundamentalist Christianity as a shield against change, and dismay at the ongoing flight of Louisiana's best people, white and black, to other states.

"Uncool Orbit" was funded by a 1991 Equipment Access Grant from New Orleans Video Access Center.


No Eating or Smoking in Tiger Suit

No Eating or

Smoking in Tiger Suit

Written and directed by Jeff Walker

Performances by Janet Wondra and Jeff Walker
Camera by Jeff Walker
Editing by Jeff Walker

Experimental video
Running time 4 min 25 sec
Completed 1991

"No Eating or Smoking in Tiger Suit" is a video solution to "The Lady, or the Tiger," the short story that has frustrated decades of high school English students with its lack of an ending: we never find out if the man chooses the door with the woman, or the door with the tiger. The video proposes a possible solution from a different viewpoint--behind the famous two doors.


What it is

What It

Is

Directed by Janet Wondra and Jeff Walker

Text written and narrated by Janet Wondra
Camera by Jeff Walker and Janet Wondra
Editing by Janet Wondra and Jeff Walker

Video poem (experimental)
Running time 5 min 17 sec
Completed 1991

"What it is," a non-narrative video poem, uses otherworldly logic to explore the seductive pull of sleep on waking life. Technological imagery--the works of a drawbridge, a wind farm in Altamont Pass, California--forms a visual counterpoint to verbal imagery of running water, human and animal bodies, and landscapes. This is the first video collaboration between poet Janet Wondra and artist Jeff Walker.

email and correspondence

Janet Wondra and Jeff Walker
290 Holman Ave.
Athens, GA 30606
(706) 543-4885
email for Jeff Walker: jeffx@negia.net
email for Janet Wondra: jwondra@arches.uga.edu

Also check out the Jeff 'n' Janet Web Site