“Beyond Narrative” Show Proposal Curated by Moyi Zhang Work and Analysis Xiaowen Chen Victoria Bradbury Roofs”)
“Two Friends” ( the fist part of “37 Red
“Two Friends” is based off an Indian folktale. In the story, a greedy cat swallows a friend, and then a nosy old woman. By the end, he has swallowed up everyone in his path. Victoria Bradbury’s puppet figures are shown walking on the ground with the aid of human hands and feet in an outdoor setting. The actions become animal-like, yet, still display a human touch. Instead of simply recording a performance, the artist utilizes unique editing techniques. For example, while the voice of the narrator says, “Gobble, Gobble, Slip, Slop”, the figures suddenly disappear when the cat swallows them up. In this montage, image and sound present a condensed narrative. The end result is left up to the viewers imagination by what is not present in the video.
Woody Packard
“Cicada”
“Cicada” is a sound and video piece telling an affectionate story between a man and a cicada who lost one of her wings. It is double-narrated by text and sound. The text is written in third person, rolling from the bottom to the top of the screen intermittently as the story goes. Even though the text is in back and white, rich emotions and exquisite sensiblility flow between the lines. After the text scrolls off screen, the artist leaves the screen blank providing the viewers the chance to rest their eyes and feel only the sound. The sound, however, is documentary in that it plays the role as an independent narrator drawing aural images. Many of the sounds are made by the cicada, making it appear so close to us that we imagine looking through the cicada’s eyes, like a virtual camera in the story. We see what cicada could see and experience cicada’s expericence. We can see the man from her eyes, feeling her pain and
happyness, even the aural images that are drawn fade out when death comes to her, like she is closing her eyes. The sound and text are alternately telling the story and make our perception shifing from seeing and hearing.
Moyi Zhang “Circle”
Moyi Zhang’s “Circle” piece is a narrative that, just like a cirle, is without a beginning or end. The ambiguous event between the two figues is happening over time and space while the camera is going around itself. Instead of following the people, the camera is scanning the suroundings, spinning by the scene. The landscape, which is almost static, becomes an empty space because there are no other events to catch the viewer’s eyes. The viewer could only see the event when the camera meet the figues at a certain point. All these points are being constructed with our imagination, generating narrative structures. This video work is trying to explore the relationship between the changing image and the looping of time. The work poses the question about our understanding of time in ourselves, time in machine and time in nature. Oral=-Mouth, Aural=ears Rebekkah Palov “Volume for Glitch in variable and determinate states ”
The time code and score of Volume comes from a seven screen video work. All the repeating texts, dots and wave lines were made by hand, free formed a certain pattern all together. In the action of repeating, the book becomes a performance being recorded based on the time code of itself. We could tell how it has been made as well as how much love and struggle went into making this work. In the way of reading this book page by page, the liner time of narrative was deconstructed by frequency and periodicity. More than sending information to the readers, it is a book about self-consciousness and the state of mediation being existence.