LAN Party or “National Take Your Daughter to Work Day

In LAN Party or “National Take Your Daughter to Work Day” Noelle Mason grafts autobiographical narrative onto appropriated images, objects, and contexts in an attempt to negotiate the complexities of power, which reverberate between the interpersonal and institutional.  The resulting installation, or local area network (LAN,) implicates the viewer in an act of violence and uses the gallery as a medium to examine the historical precedence that affirms the authority of viewership.  In LAN Party a Remington M700 police sniper rifle is poised atop a domestic looking table.  A stool and headphone set invite the viewer to position herself behind the rifle, aimed at a small ornately framed monitor across the room.  The monitor which, can only be seen and heard when standing in close proximity, shows found footage taken through the lens of an American helicopter sniper as he targets and kills Iraqis on the ground.  The video is accompanied by a telephone recording of Ms. Mason’s father’s voice coolly describing the formal qualities of his own experience with the Remington M700 (weight, material, kickback.)  Outfitted with headphones and enabled by the magnifying powers of the rifle’s scope, the viewer across the room receives the sniper footage in concert with the original soundtrack—the voices of gunmen and the booming sound of shots being fired.

still from beck video

Strangely, three people told Prince she looked like Mick Jagger in her “Beck video” and she doesn’t. So, her willingness to not look good becomes a naked humanity converted into courage – as bravado? The piece plays with vulnerability and confidence as Prince details her unspeakable belief in the potential for intimacy with a rock star she was once acquainted with. The piece also plays as challenge. To believe wholly in oneself. And to believe in one’s whole self, pushing past unnecessary parts of shame.

The piece can be seen under portfolio one at http://www.deniseprince.com – the third miniature square at the bottom of the page.

“Your video is excellent; very raw, mysterious, revealing, complex, and vulnerable, radically vulnerable. You are telling your secrets while keeping them secret… Way to go.” Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine

Stills from "Woman on a Swing" by Isabel Reichert and Heike Liss

In the video installation Woman on a Swing, Reichert and Liss explore the relationship between movement, sensation, and subject in cinematography. The video depicts a young woman on a swing; a classic motif suggesting light-hearted and carefree youth, ephemerality, desire, buoyancy.  The subject is seen from behind in an intentionally indeterminate setting, which allows/enables the viewer to project and/or identify.

Although she swings back and forth, however, she always remains in the same location within the frame, and the same distance away from the viewer. The movement and scale of the surrounding frame changes as if the movement is transposed from the subject to the camera frame. This optokinetic stimulation induces a physiological phenomena known as vection, the illusion of self-motion. 

Click here to see a an excerpt from the video

Still from Intimate Distance / Adulterer, a performance and video performed in Marfa, Texas during the Chinati Foundation's Open House weekend, October 2008.

The performance was documented and combined with additional footage for the video short. Intimate Distance/ Adulterer honestly admits to the ethical failures that are part of being human. Prince describes the unguarded pleasure of an affair and the painful destruction of her marriage without allowing for an easy moral solution.

“I have never heard of anything so raw in my life. I really respect your honesty…
You are an intense person and you seem to have no fear.  I know you must but you really put yourself out there.”
Sara Simon Behrnes

The emotional fearlessness in the work mostly consists of a willingness to look bad while speaking the truth as I know it. Confidence is important to the work and mostly in relation to the deeply sensitive voice I am employing despite the fact that it’s the last thing in the world I want to expose. It may also be the trajectory towards the things I’m most afraid of that makes the work compelling. That makes it very human. The videos have shown or will show in art galleries and festivals in Milan, Istanbul, San Francisco, Austin and (consistently) on my website.

Intimate Distance / Adulterer may be seen under portfolio one, fifth miniature square at www.deniseprince.com.

Pipecleaner, 2007

“3D-Pipes,” a kitschy late-90s Microsoft screensaver is the lo-fi setting for a quirky post-feminist intervention. Wearing a dress made out of cleaning gloves, a pole dancer invades the screensaver’s maze of pipes. Her spins, gyrations, and efforts to climb and clean the pipes become absurd when reduced to byte-sized edits that mimic the original screensaver’s recombinant logic.

Image from "the latch is off"

Denise Prince’s short film the latch is off recounts an early and culturally shameful sexual experience.

Prince, positions the experience, and therefore a more honest view of sexuality, as an integral part of a state of being whole.

The piece can be viewed at www.deniseprince.com – the second miniature square under portfolio one.

Denise Prince’s video and performance work is complex and problematic. She addresses culpability, looking good, intimacy, betrayal, unguarded pleasure and a desire for authentic connection with unexpected honesty.

exhibited as a looping 2 channel video with the monitors framing and further distancing the dandies/ view an excerpt from the loop 

Havisham [2007] is a two-channel video tableaux that seats two dandies at opposite ends of a long table piled with oversized wedding cakes.  They appear fully prepared to engage in the spectacle of marriage, but much like the character from Great Expectations, find themselves frozen in place at what should be the location of their celebration.  This piece is sympathetic to the drive for legally recognized partnerships; its melodramatic spectacle illustrates the alienation felt by two bachelors who are surrounded by symbols of marriage, but seem unable to ritually consummate their relationship.  In contrast to the position of Dickens’ Havisham, these bachelors have not been waiting for decades at their banquet table, their cakes have not rotted, and neither has been left standing at the alter. In this sense, the dandies could as easily be on a wedding cake hunger strike, protesting an obsessive pursuit of marriage and its attendant assimilation.

BLU, 2009

BLU, 2009
Video: 1:10min
Words of desire spin in a demanding hypnotic loop.
http://www.zoechan.com/sculpture/video

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one had, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is ‘I desire you,’ and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion … on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.” – Barthes, A Lovers Discourse

Let my words work upon you. My words are my body. My words can touch you. Let me touch you with my words. Let my language work into you. Let my fingers touch across your edges. Let them turn you over. Let them turn you around. Smoothly. Gently. I push. I pull. I have your words at my fingertips. I twist you at the edges of my hands. My fingers move back and forth. Back and forth. Up and down. Down and up. Let my body twist you. Smooth and stop. Stop and up. Faster, stop. Back up. Now down. Now down, now down. I work upon you. My fingers are my hands, my hands are my body, my body embraces you. It holds you. It holds you taught. In line. In control. Controlled. And I work upon you. Twisting and turning. Faster and faster. Faster and faster. Back and forth. Forth and back. Again. Faster and faster. Back and forth. Up and down. Down and up. Front and back. Back and front. Faster and stop. Stop and slowly. Slowly I release you. Let me let you go. I can touch you. I let go. Let my fingers touch your edge. Let them hold you. I will hold you. I will hold you softly. Quietly. I will turn you around and let you go softly. Let me touch you with my words. My words can touch you. My words are my body. Let my words work upon you.

Let my words work upon you. Let them touch the tip of your mind. Let them work into your body. I extend myself into your body. My fingers control my words that work their way into your body. Let them move within you.

Zoe Chan :: www.zoechanworks.com :: info@zoechanworks.com

Untitled (Fall)

Performance Still

Performance Still

Performance Still

Performance Still

Performance Still

Whispering Pines 7, Video, 2006, 4:43 min, color, sound

Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny.

shanamoultonweb.com

www.ubu.com