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Roger Beebe (Gainesville, FL) The Strip Mall Trilogy (Super-8 on mini-DV, running time 9 min.) is a series of three city symphonies that attempt to liberate color, sound, and form from the sprawling consumerist landscape of postmodern America in three parts: "Green Means Go," "The Abecedaire," and "X-formations.” Roger Beebe is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at The University of Florida. The Strip Mall Trilogy has been screened around the globe from New York to Rotterdam and from San Francisco to Beirut. It has won more than a dozen awards at festivals including MicroCineFest, the US Super 8 Film Festival, Extremely Shorts IV in Houston, TX, and the Juried Screenings of the University Film and Video Association. |
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Building A Nation Building A Nation collective declares Contemporary Arts Center a sovereign nation from September 29th-Octobter 28th, 2010, establishing its national identity, national symbols and history. To foster CAC nation’s economy, the collective re-invents the gallery as hotel casino – its “theme” inspired by cultures of nations least visited by tourists. Let’s Build A Nation explores the concept of a nation as a temporal imagined community corresponding to its immediate locale. It also addresses issues specific to Las Vegas particularly its themed hotel environments simulating cultures of other nations. Building A Nation collective is a think tank engaging in concept development using diverse methods and strategies to investigate notions on nation-building and cultural hybridity. |
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Diane Bush (Las Vegas, NV) SMEAR and LOATHING confronts political leadership in Nevada. Members of the public are invited to an interactive performance to “smear” (with diluted bleach) photos of known state and local politicians and their puppets who have disgraced themselves through poor governance and poor example. Through this act, the artist invites Las Vegas citizens to exercise their right to free-speech. Diane Olson-Bush was born in Buffalo, N.Y. At the age of 18, she emigrated to the U.K. with a draft dodger, in response to the Vietnam War. After living there for ten years and working as a documentary photographer, she returned to the U.S. where she received her Master's Degree in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her work has been exhibited and published locally, nationally, and internationally, including shows in Japan, China, Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia and France. |
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The Bridge Club Music Box, a live performance work by The Bridge Club collaborative, will address the spectacle, allure and possibility that characterize Las Vegas in the popular imagination. By nature, spectacle promises a glamorous or exciting departure from our ordinary lives, and Las Vegas—through its marketing and myth—promises the spectacular. Unlike its promise, encounters with spectacle can make the banal seem alluring, whether at the end of a short departure from one’s ordinary life, or as a more elusive change of lifestyle and value. In the banal, or the anti-spectacle, conflicts of hope, expectation, desire and comfort are made apparent. Incorporating live action, objects and sound, Music Box will begin at Don’t Tell Mama, a classic Las Vegas piano bar, before leading viewers on a tour in search of an elusive mundane reality. The Bridge Club (Emily Ward Bivens, Knoxville, TN; Christine Owen, Warren, CT; Annie Strader;, Huntsville, TX; Julie Wils, Gunnison, CO) is a visual and performance art collective creating interdisciplinary installations, videos, live performances and digital media works which are site and context specific. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned store front and a laundromat, in addition to the traditional gallery space. |
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Patrick Cadenhead (Richmond, VA) Cheyne Stokes, the internationally renown and occasionally charismatic 5’ Patrick Cadenhead has performed and shown across the U.S., Included in shows at |
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Diane Dwyer (Brooklyn, NY) Most interaction between strangers revolves around commerce --- the exchange of money for goods and services. We follow understood directions and rules that guide our behavior, yet within limited parameters, moments of intimacy might occur. Can I Get You Anything Else? is an interactive performance exploring the prescribed interactions of strangers using the language of a waitress taking an order. Diane Dwyer grew up in New England and currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is having a circus in her apartment. Her work can be seen on-line, inside, and outside. In New York, she has created installations at the Tenement Museum, Charas El Bohio, and Judson House, and she recently collaborated with K.I.D.S. and Flux Factory in a series of street actions, K.I.D.S. Has Some Work To Do. Her work has been included in the WPA/C Experimental Media Series in Washington, D.C., as well as digital media and performance festivals and screenings in Bulgaria, Cuba, Montenegro, Russia, and Venezuela. |
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Laura Smith Fillmore (Gardernville, NV) Written while looking through a surrealist lens as an activist artist living on the Washoe Indian reservation, Smith Fillmore’s zine "The Mother Of All Bombs, Hairy-Chested Hubris and the Goddess Nemesis, Queen of Blowback" will be available at the Atomic Testing Museum in a limited edition. The zine is a working script for a performance - the culmination of three years of research (and counting) on the artists' response to the birth of atomic technologies. |
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Liz Hickok, (San Francisco, CA) Suburban Growth, Las Vegas in Jell-O (digital video, 2 min, 40 sec) presents a stop-motion meditation on Las Vegas that emphasizes the precarious and possibly ephemeral moment of the Las Vegas as it exists today. Hickok’s artwork has been exhibited across the country including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Southern Exposure, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Works/San Jose, the Kala Art Institute as well as in Scottsdale, Arizona, through the Scottsdale Public Art Program. She has also exhibited internationally at the Ha’Kibbutz Israeli Art Gallery in Tel Aviv, and nationally at the Seattle Center of Contemporary Art, Pittsburg State University (KS), and the Arts and Literature Laboratory (CT). |
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Jennie Klein (Athens, OH) Jennie Klein is an associate professor of art history at Ohio University. She writes on feminist art and performance, gender, and live art. She is the editor of Letters from Linda M. Montano (Routledge 2005), the co-curator and chief catalogue essayist of the exhibition The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Work of Barbara T. Smith, and a contributing editor for Genders, PAJ, and Art Papers. She is presently editing a book on live art in Great Britain entitled A History of Live Art. |
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Danielle Kelly (Las Vegas, NV) Language and found images are used to tell a story about the often disappointing, occasionally transcendent and always confusing search for true love. In the process, the tradition of oral history is used to think about how acquired experience shifts the structure of remembered experience and calls into question the contingent truths of lived history. Investigating homogenized vs. differentiated cultural experience in the form of “visual slang”— the visual shorthand of Google images, YouTube, and memes — becomes a tool for rethinking storytelling and myth. Danielle Kelly is a Las Vegas-based artist and writer, who received her BA from Beloit College and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Working in disciplines ranging from installation to performance, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Portland. |
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Jeanne Jo (New York, NY) Russian Roulette in the Desert (digital video, running time 1 minute) documents a reoccurring performance by New York-based artist Jeanne Jo, who has roots in Reno, Nevada. For each incarnation, the artist takes a revolver into the Nevada desert and plays Russian roulette until the gun fires at her target, a porcelain doll. Jeanne Jo is a media artist who works with high and low technologies to investigate the stereotypically gendered. She was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design where she received an MFA in Digital+Media in 2008. Her BFA in Fine Art is from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she minored in Art History and screamed in a hardcore band. Her artwork has been included in numerous exhibitions in the United States and internationally. She has taught at RISD, Brown University, Emerson College, and Hostos Community College in New York City. In 2009, she co-founded a Brooklyn gallery called Tompkins Projects. She is currently a PhD candidate in Media Arts & Practice at the University of Southern California. |
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Kerry Laitala (San Francisco, CA) Glitter Gulch (16mm film on DVD, running time 10 min. loop) imparts the irony of a Marshall McLuhan critique, calling attention to the horrors and beauty of consumer culture with an equal spectacle. Stunning imagery of neon presented as a three-channel video and sound installation in 3-D (Chromadepth glasses provided!) creates a space both meditative and frenzied. Kerry Laitala received her BFA in Film & Photography with Departmental Honors from the Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston in 1992 and her MFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997. Her work has been viewed world wide and she has received many awards and recognitions including Princess Grace Award in 1996, Museum of Contemporary Grants for the “Muse of Cinema Series”- Paris ,France 2005, and most recently the Director’s Choice Award for “Spectrology” from the 29th Black Maria Film Video Film Festival 2010. www.kerrylaitala.net |
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Taylor McVay & Jordan Tynes (Jamaica Plain, NY and Boston, MA) "Taylor McVay and Jordan Tynes are California natives who make their home in Boston, MA. Jordan Tynes is an MFA candidate at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work has shown internationally in locations such as San Fransisco, Vienna and Madrid. Taylor McVay recieved her BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and currently works locally as a dressmaker while engaging in a discrete, domestic art practice. They create work together that aims to address communication, mediation and public engagement with an emphasis on liberating the everyday from social constrictions." A Wedding Invitation from Taylor/Jordan McVay/Tynes on Vimeo. |
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Hillebrand+Magsamen (Houston, TX) The work of the collaborative artistic and curatorial team of Hillerbrand+Magsamen have shown internationally in screenings and exhibitions including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, LA Freewaves New Media Art Festival, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, the Aurora Picture Show, Chicago Underground Film Festival and the Dallas Video Festival, the Hudson River Museum, Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery, Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film and the Dallas Contemporary. Through the performative strategy of what they call formational interventions, Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s work interstices between art and cultural geography by exploring perceptions of language, identity, media, and family within a uniquely American subjectivities and created system. They have been awarded the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Residency in New York City, a residency at the Experimental Television Center and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Creativity Award. They have also received a Carol Crow Fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography and a Houston Arts Alliance Artist Grant. |
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Douglas Moffat (Montreal, Quebec) In 1916, Marcel Duchamp created ‘A Hidden Noise’ / ‘Un bruit sécret’ - a ball of twine trapped between two plates concealing an unknown sound. In 1963, Marcel Duchamp visited Las Vegas for the first time.
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Nicola Morton (Brighton, Australia) Nicola Morton is a writer-artist-future-time-woman. Her moving image quirkily explores the phenomena of magic, psychic ability and transformative ritual. Her performances involve time travel and the development of alternative intelligence. She is a relational object. From a musical background, she has lived in Kiruna, Brisbane and Berlin and collaborated with artists from Turkey, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Japan, Holland and Australia. Her current interests lie in exploring the freedom of displaced culture, fortune telling and being 'wild, free and beautiful.' In 2011 she will be researching in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and moving to New York. |
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Joe Nanashe (Brooklyn, NY) The video installation 3xladyx3 (digital video, running time 4 min, 4 sec loop) is an exploration of spectacle and mass devotion, celebrity and the cult of personality, the constructed intimacy between performer and the individual, time and it’s impact on performer and performance. Joe Nanashe (Brooklyn, NY) |
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Laura Napier (Bronx, NY) Visibly organized crowds are always seen at certain places in cities. Revealing a staged quality found in real life, this experimental performance explores how simple actions can expose reflexive behavior in public space, while heightening our awareness of crowds and of the polite space we allow for strangers. |
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Minou Norouzi (London, UK) Appropriating its title from the Tim Buckley's song, u never asked to be my mountain (digital video, running time 1 min, 20 sec) is a series of static portraits of a black Saab 900 placed in every day documentary scenes. A low-tech exercise in visual trickery serves as a playful reminder that it may only take a very minor shift in perception for all things insurmountable to suddenly appear very small. |
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Zach Rockhill (Brooklyn, NY) As for the Motive that Compelled Me Friday, October 15, screening event at the SciFi Underground Screening Room Brooklyn-based artist Zach Rockhill’s project imposes an alternative lifespan and perspective on an abandoned Las Vegas house in ‘empty on empty’. The project is an assertion of perspectives through painting, cutting, demolition and reconstruction that culminates in a high definition video of the unfolding process. Our contemporary housing crisis has a historic parallel in the economic panic of 1893 that inspired Frank L. Baum to write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Among the symbols deployed by Baum, who was outraged by the gross speculation on real estate that resulted in the economic collapse of 1893, was Dorothy’s arrival in Oz as the gravity fueled fall of Aunt Em’s house. The Wicked Witch of the East, legible in Baum’s allegory as the Eastern Banking interests, is killed by the return of housing values to ground. Rockhill wittily channels the secret history of this narrative by adopting the formal device of Dorothy’s square window from the tornado sequence of Victor Fleming’s 1939 film version. The indifferent violence of the frame, which repeatedly reasserts itself in Rockhill’s video, follows a peculiar imperative, in this case channeling not only Victor Flemings cinematic and formal device but the impulse behind painting as window, frame as hole, perspective position as formal given as well. Establishing conditions where one's stated purpose and intention are not just thwarted, but potentially inverted, Rockhill looks to this formal invention as a potent medium and channel for unseen forces. This project extends Rockhill's continued interest in the undoing of principles of stability and known coordinates, as evidenced by the gravity-defying involuntary ballet in "This side Down; Damn if I know" from 2006, and his parsing of the nature of desire and motivation in "As for the Motive.." 2008. His work has been shown nationally and internationally. Recent projects include ‘Long Black’ at Fluxspace, Philadelphia, ‘STOCKROOM, The Planet in Orgasm’, in Venice, Italy concurrent to the Venice Biennial, ‘FLUIDS’ for the PERFORMA 07 biennial, screenings of work this year at Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Crawl Space (Seattle) Zero station (Portland ME), Dieu Donne (New York City) and THE FUTURE WAS THEN, SO NOW WHAT … screening at both scope (NYC) and the Basel Art Fair. He is a recipient of a Finishing Funds Grant through the Electronic media and Film Program of the New York State Council of the Arts in 2009 and was a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Cross Disciplinary.
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Sensorium Lab Sensorium Lab is a cross-disciplinary research group focusing on research that develops systems of interaction that encourage kinesthetic perception and interpretation. Their installation Open Field will generate audio and visuals based on analog phenomena related to the electromagnetic spectrum, body capacitance and the resonant properties of matter. Participants are invited to experience these phenomena by interacting with the space around the installation. |
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Sister (Los Angeles, CA) In The Cutter, a Vegas showgirl lashes out against the superficial nature of glamour to reveal the vulnerability of her flesh. Through a cathartic hysterical fit, she defies the perfecting confinement of female beauty rituals and exposes her mortal, leaking body. Inspired by the template of the coven, Sister is a collaborative exploration of cultural myths and narratives that have shaped notions of female identity through the ages. Sister engages esoterica, private ritual, and mystical symbolism to express visceral and emotive manifestations of the human form. Sister challenges the boundaries of the body and aims to blur delineations between interior and exterior experience. Sister is the collaborative duo of Launa Bacon And Cindy Rehm. |
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Heather Sparks (San Francisco, CA) "Within My Nature" is a single-channel video of kaleidoscopic landscapes incorporating digitally rendered images of scanned skin and hair; an inorganic and organic construction. |
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Scott Stark (Austin, TX) Scott Stark has made over 70 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous installations, performances and photo-collages as well. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum, and many others. His 16mm film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He now lives in Austin, Texas. He is the webmaster for Flicker (www.hi-beam.net), the web resource for experimental film and video. |
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Test Market (Las Vegas, NV) “Schadenfreude” is a broken soundscape that devolves into a stage performance that melds men, machine, time and space. It is dark, humorous and furiously absurd that will push the boundaries of artistic integrity and the buttons of the audience. |
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Emerge4 Las Vegas as we know is a famous destination place for gambling, sex, have fun, and drink twenty four hours a day. This project essentially reveals places and people who live off the strip, away from the Las Vegas neon and how they have been acclimated to be part of this town that is not noticeable by tourists. The viewer will experience the other side of the sin city, a taste of the real community and their acclimation in a short 3 minute video. www.eriking.net |
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Kristina Wong (Los Angeles, CA) “Going Green the Wong Way” is a new multimedia solo play written and performed by Kristina Wong. This new work details the artist’s two years (and counting) of living in Los Angeles without a car after a well-intentioned effort to “go green” (driving a car that ran on vegetable oil blew up in her face on the 405 Freeway.) Going Green the Wong Way is focused around the urban landscape of Los Angeles—a city that like Las Vegas is characterized for its sprawling roads and freeways that make navigation without a car close to impossible. |
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