Jennifer Somerstein's work was a humourous narrative video that depicted a situation in which two people had switched voices. Outside help was sought, and through simple household magic voices were re-jumbled, with one character receiving her proper voice back and leaving the other two to sort through the issue alone when the scene closes. Somerstein's piece depicts the jarring nature of displaced voices, and their importance to issues of identity.
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Yota Konishi's work was a class-long durational performance wherein he used a computer to do repetitive strength training. He lifted the tower with squats, did crunches with the keyboard, and hefted the monitor. The piece was inevitably both comic and poignant, reflecting a tension in the displacement of the physical body in relation to new cyberworlds.
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Patrick Cruz entered the space wearing a tall mask of an old, bearded white man. He wore a white hoodie and white spandex pants stuffed with styrofoam balls. Once he had entered the space and sat down, he removed the mask and the styrofoam balls from his pants and read to the audience in Spanish from papers... or maybe he just spoke and used the papers as a prop? The style of his oration was casual and stumbling, and he picked his nose while talking. After the performance, he stated that he had been narrating what he was doing. This piece toyed with notions of dislocation of traditional authority (white mask, big balls) and the banality of performance art.
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Martina Comstock performed a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise that was projected onto her face wrapped in white cloth. It seems as if she is working within modes of constructed identity and the dislocation of self into new, cybernetic forms that have very little to do with the physical subject's presence in space.
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Genevieve Cloutier,
Grant Hash and
Anna White presented video documentation of a collaborative piece that involved the construction and dismantlement of a temporary house structure in the urban environment. Literally engaged in the construction of a new village through a collaborative blog (
www.showandtellvancouver.blogspot.com), the artists' gesture seems to be a call to the formation of community-based art practice and a coinciding self-sufficiency praxis within a city space.
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Andy Lee's video "Drop" is a colorful blend of hip-hop and Asian culture, featuring Andy rapping and an Asian friend performing tricks with a basketball. It references recent popular culture trends in remixing and cultural appropriation. It seems to confront issues of globalization and its consequences in cultural osmosis.
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Derya Akay's video chat projection involved the screening of a Satanism documentary with a composite image of him and a "googled" image of Satanism in the lower left hand corner. According to Derya, his video chat pointedly failed, though I was unclear as to the conceptual reasons for that. It was an interesting comment on myth; the Satanism documentary was obviously made by an antagonistic party but the imagery presented in the piece's accompanying pamphlet-zine was a wide range of different, "evil" imagery that seemed to be compiled from a myriad of different ideologies.
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Ruben Castelblanceo's video projection was a short loop of powerful audio and fractured imagery that featured a long-haired protagonist in various states of tension and relaxation. It was visually impactful and operated very well as an immersive installation with its intensity of sound.
