I’m sure before the end of this paragraph I’ll come up with a local male video artist of importance. But the ones who seem to get most of the attention are women. In fact, a show opened Thursday night at the UTSA Satellite Gallery over at the Blue Star Art Complex. All Ladies Video Review. It’s a group show featuring works by Guillermina “Gisha” Zabala, Anne Wallace, Julia Barbosa Landois, Michele Monseau, and Joey Fauerso — curated by Leslie Raymond and Cornelia White Swann. It continues until Jan. 25th.
Oh, of course, George Cisneros. And Luis Valderas seems well on his way to expanding out into the realm of video art. The y chromosomes seem sadly under represented locally in this field.
Check it out. It’s a good show. Gisha has an older piece — a three channel installation — and I had only seen a third of it before. I was glad to see the whole piece. Julia continues to work with Catholic themes seen through a feminist’s eyes with a close up study of her own feet with just a hint of the stigmata, or are they symmetrically occurring mosquito bites? A hand enters the frame to dab at them with a cotton ball, perhaps soaked with Phisohex. Michele’s piece, a large diptych, resembles another piece of hers I’d seen before. The camera pans up a building and then back down. At the sidewalk level is a person laying on the ground. The two projectors are rotated into portrait layout and the pans are out of sync. What I liked best was when one channel (projector) pans up, while the other pans down. Creates a nice sense of vertigo. Anne has two pieces. One plays on a small flat screen on the wall with headphones to use. It’s a piece she did while in residence at ArtsPace. She mentioned it to me before, but I’d never seen it. There was another work from Anne, in a room off the main gallery. The video was projected on the wall. Footage of domestic locations superimposed with underwater footage. We occasionally saw a scuba diver swimming about. But the audio of mechanical assisted breathing wasn’t air passing through the mouthpiece of diving tanks as I first thought. Rather it was the clinically cold cycling compressor of a hospital (or, more likely, hospice) breathing device. A sad intersection of nostalgia and the managed care of a terminal patient.
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I’m not a fan of the News Year’s Resolution. I’ve savaged so many in past years, five to six weeks out of the gate. Actually, the one thing I most need to do in 2009 is to develop a plan and stick with it. I have a horrible habit of following the path of least resistance, never saying no to other people, and generally drifting about wherever the wind might blow.
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I thought I might toss a couple of my videos onto my iPhone. It’s letting me down. I look a QuickTime file and squeezed it through iMovie, compressing it as the iPod setting. I stuck the new file into my iTunes, and was able to watch the movie through its player. But damned if I can figure out how to drop the file into a folder which my iPhone will upload. So much of the information on the internet concerns accessing TV shows onto the iPhone through iTunes. I’m not trying to put seasons one through whatever of Lost on my phone. I want to stick on it a file of content I created. If anyone has any tips, drop me a line.
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Tonight is the 24th annual anniversary performance party of the Jump-Start Performance Company. Jump-Start is by far the most vital and innovative theater company in San Antonio. Come out and show your support. This will be, I believe, the fourth year in a row I’ll have attended. It’s a blast, shockingly affordable, but come early to be sure to get a seat. Check out the website to see when the box-office opens.
These yearly events are variety shows which give a quick insight into the incredible talent among San Antonio’s performance community. You’ll be sure to see vignettes of current and upcoming shows of local theater, dance (traditional and modern), performance art, experimental sketch comedy, all manner of music, and, the perplexingly uncategorizable.
Michael Verdi is doing a 24 hour video podcast in conjunction with Jump-Start. He’s curated live video feeds with 24 artists from all over.