11 en el 2011 About the Project Collaborators About the Museo de Arte de Ponce Reviews              
 
[VideoArt and Experimental Film]


[Artists]
Stephanie Dodes (New York)
Maya Erdelyi (New York)
Cliff Evans (Australian)
Yeo Lee Nah (Singapore)
Marta Mabel Pérez (Puerto Rico)
Carlos Ruiz-Valarino (Puerto Rico)
José Soto (Puerto Rico)
Eva Tang (Singapore)
Victric Thng (Singapore)
Guillermo A. Vázquez (Puerto Rico)
Alison Ward (Florida)

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[Versión español]





Stephanie Dodes (New York)

Veiled Shadows (Psychologist Office and Interrogation Scenes)

[2010 / 4:5 minutes]
The museum presents one of the nine channels that make up Stephanie Dodes’ installation. Veiled Shadows explores the destabilization of identity, notions of beauty, and the power of gestural language. The artist employs multiple points of view on her characters simultaneously: on the one hand they behave naturally, while on the other, they represent the externalization of the protagonist’s agitated psyche. Veiled Shadows (Psychologist Office and Interrogation Scenes) is performed by two actresses in a scene in which glamour and the absurd become another metaphor for that externalization. The artist informs us of bizarre, absurd social codes and iconic relationships.

[Biography]

Maya Erdelyi (New York)

The Well

[2010 / 2:23 minutes]
Erdelyi illustrates a French love song through a combination of stop-motion film, puppets, and actors. The lyrics involve a shepherdess who follows a pink cloud that rains a magic elixir down into a well (Le puit). She looks into the magical pink water and sees her future and her potential bliss. She sees wonderful things but then is frightened and runs home. The next morning she changes her mind and decides to go back and drink the elixir. Alas, the magical liquid has all evaporated in the sun. The ending, however, offers us hope. Erdelyi takes her inspiration from dreams, memories, and profound experiences. Her work explores the cycles of life and the realms of consciousness through hybrid animations: handmade papier-maché puppets in digital worlds.

[Biography]


Cliff Evans (Australian)

Citizen: The Wolf and the Nanny

[2009 / 6 minutes in loop]
Cliff Evans offers this animated loop filled with metaphors and composed solely of images and videos downloaded from the internet. The artist creates contrasting images — a spacesuit hovering above a Garden of Eden; missiles in the sky above a nanny jogging in a luxuriant landscape — in order to speak of the early-twenty-first-century utopian yet apocalyptic imagination. Within the sequences of Citizen: The Wolf and the Nanny, Evans returns again and again to the figure of the wolf, which can be seen as a primitive, menacing force, while the other title character, the nanny, suggests domestication, security, and order.

[Biography]

Yeo Lee Nah (Singapore)

Nothing is Forever

[2010 / 1:19 minutes]
Yeo Lee Nah presents a video in which we see the most ordinary actions — like pouring water into a glass or cutting up food on a plate —tweaked against the logic of depletion and consumption, showing infinity at work. The artist uses these everyday objects and situations as a way of lightening the complexity behind the theory of infinity.

[Biography]

Marta Mabel Pérez (Puerto Rico)

American Citizenship Test

[2010 / 30 minutes]
Marta Mabel Pérez examines the burning question of immigration by pointing out the complexities within, and paradoxes between, local and global interests. She is inspired by everyday life, and her video takes shape in profoundly thoughtful stories and confessions. In this way Pérez skillfully blurs the boundaries between art, the public space, and the personal space. American Citizenship Test is a part of the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce.

[Biography]

Carlos Ruíz-Valarino (Puerto Rico)

Generating a Paradise

[2010 / 4:14 minutes]
Carlos Ruiz-Valarino approaches the subject of paradise from an aesthetic yet sociological point of view, as evidenced in the title’s play on words. The artist is interested in the idea of paradise as constructed out of the deepest well of our desires, emphasizing the obviously ephemeral nature of our fantasies. In Generating a Paradise, he uses a slow, deliberately-paced sequence that invites us to contemplate the lovely beachscape in much the same way we look at a photograph.

[Biography]

José Soto (Puerto Rico)

 Morning Breeze

[2011 / 0:35 seconds]
José Soto has taken images from Fox Television’s “Good Day New York” and edited out all the words, leaving just the breath that precedes each phrase spoken on the show. “I realized that there was a sound pattern generated by the reporter’s breathing that could be extracted through editing. What I wanted to do was create a new experience for the viewer, one that could reveal the moment of truth: the moment when this public figure is forced, by the need to breathe, to be a human being and a part of nature.” The artist employs images from the mass media as a strategy for playfully showing us our inescapable need for two things: breathing as the source of life, and the morning news.

[Biography]

Eva Tang (Singapur)

Solitary Moon

[2010 / 2:9 minutes]
Eva Tang was inspired to create this moving work by a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby: “I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others, young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

[Biography]

Victric Thng (Singapore)

Locust

[2003 / 3:25 minutes]
In this lyrical film, Victric Thng relives a fleeting moment in the past when two strangers embraced and shared a profound connection. The artist offers a sublime glimpse into the nature of human relations and the desire for intimacy.

[Biography]

Guillermo A. Vázquez (Puerto Rico)

Rage

[2003 / 1:20 minutes]
Guillermo A. Vázquez presents us with an everyday object - a bottle of soda - through which he narrates the process of development of the Rage. The artist takes advantage of the chemical phenomenon produced inside the bottle to illustrate the visceral, emotional, and finally uncontainable evolution of rage.

[Biography]

Alison Ward (Florida)

Birthday Girl

[2003 / 4:52 minutes]
Alison Ward reinterprets herself as a birthday girl, decked out in a rococo-aesthetic dress and wig, who, à la Tom Jones, indulges in a sensual feast of 30 birthday cupcakes. But as she eats — . . . 15, 16, 17, . . . 25 — she becomes nauseated and can hardly go on. By the time she gets to cupcake number 30, she is in tears and has hardly enough energy to blow out the candle. This video is a flamboyant performance and a clever commentary on the inevitability and tragicomedy of the passage of time. In her work, Ward presents us with a world inhabited by masked characters, many disguised as icons of popular culture, in order to illustrate complex ideas and emotions.

[Biography]
 
 
11 en 2011 | Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc. Ponce, Puerto Rico. | Derechos Reservados 2011