All Ladies Video Review

All Ladies Video Review Gallery hours Fri-Sun 12 – 6 or by appointment 210.458.4391

Scott A. Sherer, PhD Gallery Director and Associate Professor of Art History UTSA Department of Art and Art History One UTSA Circle San Antonio, Texas 78249 phone 210.458.4391 for more info: http://art.utsa.edu

Photography courtesy of the artists Colophon set in Function Family Headline text set in the Engravers Gothic Family Body text set in the Function Family Designed by Rachel Schimelman Cover image: Anne Wallace, Dreams, digital video, 5:00 minutes, 2002 Copyright © 2008–2009 by The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form by any means without written permission of the artist or publishers.

Curated by Leslie Raymond and Cornelia White Swann

January 1 – 25. 2009 Joey Fauerso Julia Barbosa Landois Karen Mahaffy Michele Monseau Anne Wallace Guillermina Zabala

The late1960s were a revolutionary period for the feminist movement in the United States: the first national women’s liberation conference was held in Chicago, the National Abortion Rights League (NARAL) was founded and Catholics were banned by the Pope from using the newly FDA-approved birth control pill. In 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was at its peak, and 25 million televisions were installed across the country. Americans were seeing moving images of war and protests on the daily news, and soap operas and sitcoms created weekly routines for families. Portable video, the technology that brought world events to living rooms, became available to document the everyday lives of everyday people.

Between 1965 and 1968, the first hand-held video camera, the Sony Portapak, was made available to consumers at retail prices of $1400-2000, a price point that was 1/20th of the cost of professional studio equipment. Weighing just 27 lbs., this technology was light enough for easy carrying. The convergence of new technology and the feminist movement brought a new voice in video. Women quickly became active producers and took charge of their own representation and produced their own creative projects.

Many artists were drawn to the freedom that video technology gave them. Artists documented performances in front of live audiences, created video diaries of their experiences, and manipulated the material to create kaleidoscopic experiments of audio, feedback loops and moving imagery. Shigeko Kubota, wife and partner of Nam June Paik, called her Sony Portapak her “baby” which she carried on her back while taping footage in Europe.

With the birth of video art, came the need for new viewing spaces. In New York, The Kitchen started as an informal place for screening video and sound works, for dialogue, critique and exchange of ideas. Members experimented with viewing environments, sometimes with mounds of pillows on the floor, with monitors suspended from the ceiling or with traditional film viewing with seating on benches or chairs. The Kitchen became a boiling pot for new media and experimentation, launching the careers of Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson, Kiki Smith, Philip Glass, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman and many more. The rules were not yet written, and artists at the time were laying the foundation for what video art is today.

The first New York Women’s Video Festival had enough submissions to dedicate fifteen days to works created, produced or directed by “women videotape makers.” The videos ranged from documentary to avant-garde and experimental compositions with themes exploring a variety of topics such as politics, feminism and sexuality. Individual artists and video collectives made submissions, and in a review dated October 1972 for the feminist newsjournal, Off Our Backs, Maryse Holder wrote, “If this Festival, which was well–attended even on weekdays, argues anything at all, it must certainly be that videotape — and women — loom large as major interests of the future.”

Today, women video artists and filmmakers have a platform to showcase their work in regional, national and international festivals and exhibitions. Since 1989, The St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival (Newfoundland, Canada) has screened over 581 films created by women from around the world. The Black Women’s International Film and Video Festival, based in Toronto, Canada, continues to grow since its beginnings as a “movie night” program by the Toronto Queer women’s organization. Though recently closed, Women in the Director’s Chair, a Chicago-based international media arts organization, promoted and exhibited media made by women, girls and transgender people for 25 years. Women of Color Film Festival in Santa Cruz, California, has screened over 300 films and videos from women including work by Chicana filmmaker Lourdes Portillo. When asked about the importance of highlighting women video work, New York Women’s Video Festival founder Steina Vasulka remarks, “Drawing attention to work by women in a specialized forum brings it more directly into the public eye.”

Regionally, in south central Texas, women have taken the lead in video art. San Antonio–based artists such as Joey Fauerso, Julia Barbosa Landois, Karen Mahaffy, Michele Monseau, Anne Wallace, and Guillermina Zabala utilize video to highlight themes such as time, place, politics, spirituality, human consciousness and the poetry of everyday life.

The politics of religion and the female body are narrated in Landois’s Window Dressing.

Discontent with the political state of affairs is depicted in Zabala’s State of Disunion. Fauerso’s Ian (Be still), Monseau’s Isabel, and Mahaffy’s Untitled (look up) focus on human consciousness, time and place by sharing the ephemeral moments of beauty, dreams and unfocused thought. Wallace combines two disparate places to illustrate childhood memory and personal loss in Dreams.

While they may be underrepresented as a whole in the art world, women have made great strides in the genre of video art. With over 30 years of history, women’s contributions to video art continue to evolve aesthetically, technically, and conceptually. Advances in technology have created a digital world where diverse artists have the capability of creating video and distributing it to broad audiences in a variety of formats and on the world wide web. The strength of women in video is evident in the exceptional character of their work.

— Cornelia White Swann Melinda Barlow, “Feminism 101: The New York Women’s Video Festival, 1972-1980,” Camera Obscura 18 (2003).

Oliver Grau, ed., MediaArtHistories (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007).

Maryse Holder, “Women’s Video Festival,” Off Our Backs 3.2 (October 1972).

Judy Malloy, ed., Women, Art and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003).

Pat Wadsley and Jill Kirschenbaum. “Golden Age of Video Art,” New York Cue (January 18, 1980).

Joey Fauerso

Combining traditional portraiture with animation, Fauerso explores the quiet and active mental states of her subject in Ian (Be Still). Over 2000 found drawings of birds, branches and flowers become the animated backdrop for the still figure in the center. The birds’ movements reflected or mirrored against each other offer a kaleidoscopic view of fluttered thoughts ranging from the tranquil to the frantic — illustrating the experiences of unfocused contemplation. Influenced by her upbringing in a Transcendental Meditation community, Fauerso utilizes computer applications and painting to explore the nature of human consciousness. Ian (Be still) is the newest addition to a series of animations incorporating found landscapes that represent different kinds of physical and metaphorical transcendence.

“There is an assumption that we move through a relatively fixed world, but in Ian (Be Still), it is the opposite; the world kind of moves through Ian.” - Joey Fauerso

Ian [Be Still], video animation, 4:00 minutes, 2008

Red polished nails, church bells and stigmata come together in Landois’ video Window Dressing. A woman’s hands are shown carefully dressing wounds on the top of her feet that are resting on a window sill. Her hands, with red polished nails, occasionally appear in the video revealing bandages on each wrist. The sounds of traffic and church bells can be heard coming in from outside her window. Landois combines and challenges ideas of religion, feminism and ritual in the present of an everyday setting. Visual cues emerge that explore notions of physical and spiritual authenticity in a contemporary world.

“My performance/video work explores the cultural trappings of belief, specifically in rituals occurring at the convergence of Catholicism, Mexican folk practice (curanderismo) and Latin identity.” — Julia Barbosa Landois

Julia Barbosa Landois

Window Dressing, digital video, 3:23 minutes, 2006

A gateway to the sky gives viewers a glimpse into the poetry of everyday moments in Mahaffy’s Untitled (look up). Time lapse video captures the ephemeral movements of clouds, birds flying in unison and sky turning to darkness. The title, acting almost as a reminder, suggests that we take the simple action of looking up to reveal the drama and beauty of the world above. The original four hour video was filmed in an everyday public place – a parking garage in downtown San Antonio. Edited down to less than an hour, the video moves the viewer through time while articulating the seemingly insignificant elements between commonplace, objects and experiences.

“My work endeavors to serve as reminders of the exquisite contained among the ordinary and to reify our capacity to recognize it.” — Karen Mahaffy

Karen Mahaffy

Untitled [look up], digital video, 53:09 minutes, 2008

Filmed in Mexico City at the foot of a bank building on the corner of Isabel Street, Monseau continues her series Gone Again with Isabel. A monolithic building rises above two figures who appear to be asleep on the ground. The camera follows the lines of the building from the ground up toward the sky and then back down to the figures on the ground, and the circumstances surrounding their placement and position below the building remain a mystery. Dealing with issues of identity and history, Isabel places figures into a context much larger than the person, both historically and physically. Using a motif of “sleeping” as the main metaphor, the artist delves into the realms of escapism, dreams and cultural responses to everyday struggles.

“By placing a person into a context much larger than that person, both historically and physically, the architecture/backdrop is the physical manifestation of the weight of history.”

— Michele Monseau

Michele Monseau

Isabel, digital video, 2 channel projection, 0:50 seconds, 2008

Anne Wallace

Two worlds superimpose each other in Wallace’s video Dream. A pale woman dives through the reflections of sky and trees on a quiet lake, drifting down to an empty house at the bottom of the sea. As she swims from room to room, the sound of her scuba regulator changes imperceptibly into the sound of a hospital ventilator and the point of view shifts; the diver has become the fish. The dream world that Wallace creates mimics the often disjointed narrative of subconscious thought. Memories of past experiences, sounds and places meld together, forming a graceful and sometimes haunting reality.

“This video was created as the projection component of an installation about childhood, memory and loss, in particular my younger sister’s death.“ — Anne Wallace

Dreams, digital video, 5:00 minutes, 2002

Utilizing Japanese Botoh dance movement, media sound bites and electronic sound effects, Zabala’s three video installation, State of Disunion, explores the consequences of repression and the abuse of power in a supposedly democratic government. Politically charged issues of discrimination, violence and torture reflect the state of a society that is under watch in the name of freedom. In the video segment F-watch, white painted dancers move with hyper-controlled actions, struggling with feelings of anger and desperation while hearing George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech.

“The contrast of sound and images reminds us of the contrast between truth and the official story.” — Guillermina Zabala

Guillermina Zabala

State of Disunion, digital video, 3 channel installation, 5:00 minutes, 2008