A New Honor For Goodbye Victoria [Streaming Festival Highlights Program]
The Streaming Festival is organized by the isfth foundation. Isfth is a non-profit foundation that provides support for projects that encourage the understanding of audiovisual art. The foundation is based in The Hague, The Netherlands. More information is here.
I recently received word that the Streaming Festival will honor Goodbye Victoria by featuring the film as part of the festival's highlights program. This program honors the festival's top ten films.
The festival runs from November 20-30, and Goodbye Victoria will be the highlight of the festival on November 23rd.
Back From Manhattan [Best Feature Film Award at Chashama Film Festival]
The trip to New York was invigorating, but much too short. I got a chance to see a handful of friends for a brief period of time, and I wish I could have stayed longer.
The film festival was very enjoyable despite the weather (even the mighty Yankees' game was rained out). Matthew Potter and I were fortunate to win the 'Best Feature Film' award for Goodbye Victoria, for which we are very grateful.
Below are some pictures from the festival after party following the screening of GBV.
Paige Parker and Steve Stubblefield.
Steve Stubblefield and Tyler Jopek.
Jordan Starr-Bochicchio.
Diran Lyons, festival director Rick Kariolic, and filmmaker Steven Flor.
FIVE+5 Fresno Stop [Images from Opening Reception / 8.6.2009]
Posted below are images from the traveling exhibition FIVE+5, which Donald Munro writes about here and I previously mentioned on the blog here. I also composed a wall text for the Fresno leg of the exhibit.
The exhibit visited Tampa, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Fresno, California respectively in 2009. The first three venues were more intimate spaces, so the work by the artists were correspondingly smaller. As the show turned to Fresno, I suggested that the artists address Gallery 25's larger space by producing more expansive paper works so as to ward off being enveloped by the 80 foot by 60 foot concourse and its daunting 20 foot high ceilings. A few pictures from the opening follow below:
Atsushi Temeda, Armchair 1 - 5. 2009.
Diran Lyons. Goodbye Victoria Artifacts 2 - 5. 2009.
Diran Lyons (L) and Robbie Land (R).
Kurt Piazza (L), Cameron Brian (C), and Tracy Midulla Reller (R).
Cameron Brian. X Marks The Spot. 2009.
Tracy Midulla Reller. (L) Men must work and women must weep, Connected No.4, and They will fight with sticks and stones. Each work, 2008. (R) Circuit Sketch 4. 2009.
A Reading (15 Excerpts From Collegiate Student Essays)
A Reading (15 Excerpts From Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009) HD DVD 5 Minutes 40 Seconds 2009 "What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which… are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins." --Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.
As an artist committed to Nietzsche studies, I have always been inspired by his investigations into language and its relation to thought, metaphysics, and truth. His once-controversial assertion above -- a positing of truth as mere metaphor, metonymy, and conventions of speech -- propelled many of my projects, each endeavoring to investigate the "Creative Lie," i.e., the inherent conceptual illusions and deceptive conundrums imbued in aesthetic objects. A Reading (15 Excerpts From Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009), however, investigates language not to form postures about its nature or how its structures produce meaning, but to rather pose as a depiction of the growing problem within our country and abroad: illiteracy and the devolving educational system that gives rise to it. As such, the video laments a moment in US history when the "mobile army" to which Nietzsche refers is increasingly becoming less and less mobile, just not in the sense he meant.
Look Like If The Words Are Bleeding (Collected Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009)
As an instructor of art for the past 7 years, I have had the disheartening experience of encountering illiteracy at the college level with a frequency that far exceeded my expectations. Having taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fresno City College; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, FL; and Bakersfield College, I decided to collect the hundreds of student essays written for my classes that were abandoned by their authors (the fact that these students did not find the retrieval of their work to be important was in many ways discouraging enough). I decided to archive these student essays as documentation of the growing illiteracy problem, for what I found in the contents therein mirrored and sometimes surpassed the following data.
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, keeps track of literacy statistics and estimates that 20 percent of all adults, or 774 million, are not literate. In addition, there are 75 million children who are not attending school and are therefore not on the path of becoming literate.
More locally, the United States’ illiteracy rate is likewise alarming. According to the National Right to Read Foundation, 42 million American adults cannot read at all, 50 million are unable to read at a higher level than is expected of a fourth or fifth grader, and 20 percent of high school seniors can be classified as being functionally illiterate at the time they graduate. The demoralizing inference is that of a populace numbering around 300 million, approximately 25-30 percent cannot read and write.
According to Jenkins Group, 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college, and 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year. The National Institute for Literacy compiled the following information: 70 percent of prisoners in state and federal systems can be classified as illiterate, 85 percent of all juvenile offenders rate as functionally or marginally illiterate, and 43 percent of those whose literacy skills are lowest live in poverty.
The project below, Look Like If The Words Are Bleeding (Collected Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009), represents a small portion of the student writings that I have archived. The writings were composed by students of all races as well as members of various age groups. The collection of texts is algorithmically organized in the form of a two-dimensional grid, according to a given essay’s chronology within the archive and its degree of linguistic incompetence. The students’ names are blacked out in order to protect their identities, and the red pen markings serve as a corrective function. The red markings make visible the overwhelming quantity of errors being made by students on official, assigned essays or writings within the space of academia. The push pins are color-coded for viewer ease in visualizing the origin of the texts (I.e., a distinct color is assigned to each school at which I taught).
Due to the size of the piece overall (approximately 17 feet long and 15 high), certain statements have been enlarged on white butcher paper, sporadically threaded within the grid. Those marked by asterisks represent student texts that were hand-written, thus excluding the possibility of typographical error. These excerpts, overall, are formidable stand-ins for the types of inadequacies that one will frequently encounter throughout the student writings, fusing the presented work, interestingly enough, with a humorous sensibility. This comical aspect thereby gives the work a sublime punch of pleasure (a viewer’s pleasure in the form of laughter while reading such horrifically composed statements) commingled with pain (the terrible potential scenarios one can project regarding the future of the United States if a successful educational remedy is not implemented).
I'll close with a few meticulously copied "statements" that one can find strewn about within the essays/writings, followed by photographic documentation of the finalized project.
1) The people that are around the three crosses have source and many other weapons showing hate thorst Jesus.*
2) I like art so much intil I was shild.*
3) The artist work was native drawing and use on ink without carbon.
4) The video was made with funny reaction twenty feet long, and the footage of the tress were spinning systematic ally.
5) Art refers to describe a particular type of creative production generated by us human evil beings, and the term usually implies some degree of aesthetic value.
6) There was another fish creation on a larger canvas when in was orange wax fish on turquoise wash background.
7) The board itself has a collection of Warhol paintings how do know they have all authentic and they just so happen to own the largest portion of Warhol works to sell as they see fit.
8) The one particular eye catcher in the picture is to the left of the painting are two red lines almost as if I the background.
9) On the other hand, the photo that was shown in ceiling room contains these materials: flat screen projector, audio the here the supposedly wind.
10) There is more water then anything in the painting to the visual importance is present yet the closer the waves in eyesight the larger they are as along with the birds.
11) I mentions Jasmine painting are totally different then the others.
12) Sol Lewit Was a key figure in conceptual art, and the way the middle eye and physical space interact.
13) Schnabel says Banquiat gifted yes, but unable to use gifts in sustained, meaningful way.
14) Rembradt has paint very classic well detail on his paints.*
15) VanGogh use many shokes in his paint and many color in each shoke.*
California Excursions (2006) [DVD Available for Purchase]
In 2006, I produced and co-directed a short film with Jesse Wilson that documented our performances with large inflatable balloons up and down the natural California landscape.
