Houston

We went to H-Town for "Co-Existing & Co-Llaborating," an Aurora Picture Show screening featuring the video work of six collaborating couples, and to follow up on Media Archeology biz (we have been invited by Aurora to take part in the 2010 festival, coming up in mid-September).  It became apparent that a return trip within the next week or two was going to be inevitable, so heres a mini-report on these goings-on.

Aurora Picture Show director Mary Magsaman introduces the screening to a full house.  We had a fun couple days with the McCoys, another collaborating couple with work in the screening, who were there from NYC with their 2 kids.... all of us presenting in Mary's Interdisciplinary Art class at U of H, doing an interview for the KUHF, a lively Q/A session after the screening, and just generally hanging out.

Getting to stay at the Aurora office is always a treat because of the video library!  The screening room doubles as a guest room, so we can watch video art projected on the wall across from the bed-- here is the menu screen from a LowVid DVD.

The site we selected for our Media Archeology project is the Heights Theater which was built in 1928 and has some interesting history to it. Functioning as an art gallery nowadays, we worked on securing it as the location for our new piece which will riff off some of that fascinating history-- namely that it was burnt down in the late 60's because it was showing "I am Curious: Yellow."  

Here is Jason with Heights Theater owner Gus Kopriva in a storage room at his Redbud Gallery.  He is showing us the 35mm film print which looks to be in great condition.  For whatever reason, the print was never returned to the distributor and we got to open the cases for he first time since they were closed up over 40 years ago!

The credit goes to our good pal Dr. Tish Stringer for introducing us to the Heights Theater when she took us around Houston months ago on a field trip of potential sites for our project.  This picture shows me, Jay, Iris, Tish, and Herb just after a ritual Saturday morning dim-sum session.  YUM.  Houston has a large Asian population, resulting in awesome dim-sum.

On our way home to San Antonio, we dropped by the Forbidden Gardens, a somewhat forlorn roadside attraction sporting a 1/3 size fiberglass replica of the Xi'an tomb site of Qin Shi Huang-di (along with a few full sized warriors) complete with a park employee in the tedious process of cleaning it; a miniature dilapidated model of the Forbidden City; a rather dusty exhibit of an imperial dinner table complete with imitation foodstuffs; and a room full of traditional weaponry, mostly bolted down to discourage visitors from getting overly interactive.

Back in Time: AURORA (late October)

We made two trips to Houston at the end October.  The first was for the Aurora Picture Show 10th Anniversary Gala dinner, for which we completed a new single-channel piece, "Double Thunder." A few other artists were also asked to contribute new works to this celebration for a limited edition special DVD given to the guests...  interstingly, half of us were collaborating couples: Magsaman & Hillerbrand (Mary M. and Steve H.); Be Johnny (Bree Edwards and Johnny DeKam); and PBL. John Carrithers, Kara Hearn, and Eileen Maxson are the others.

a Franco Mondini-Ruiz paining occupies a special alcove space at the Fingers' new house

The "Celestial Event" took place at the recently acquired and renovated home of Martha & Richard Finger, backing up into the Buffalo Bayou... and I mean recent--the paint was practically still wet!  I know they worked incredibly hard towards completion, and it was a truly lovely setting for this special night.

Lucky us, we got to stay in the guest room at the Aurora Library! Super-awesome to have access to all of the videos there, with two built-in screening spaces. It reminded me of when I was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I'd spend my spare time in the Video Data Bank stacks watching everything that seemed remotely interesting! At Aurora I watched documentation from past Media Archeology events like TV Sheriff, Wet Gate, Paper Rad and Cory Arcangel, and single channel works of Takeshi Murata, Joel Schlemowitz, Jackie Goss, and others.

The night after the gala we had the pleasure of seeing Bill Morrision and his work at the Aurora Theater. Bill was in town working on the "Lightning at our Feet" production, in collaboration with the University of Houston Mitchell Center. Best known for his feature-length avant-garde film "Decasia," we were fortunate to see this rare collection of works he had created over the years in cooperation with various of theatrical projects.

We made our return to Houston on Halloween to present Fortune at the Aurora Picture Show Theater, and lots of people came in costume. Aurora Picture Show fickr pix. After the show, we ended up at some nondescript-on-the-outside bar, notorious as a place bosses take their secretaries for a little undercover nookie.  The upstairs was a room filled with vinyl couch-booths. Ew. We hung out downstairs in costume. Matt Coolidge was in town, and having him in the mix was the cherry on the sundae.

The next day, we tooled around Houston bit, and were pleasantly surprised to run into our friend James Craig, who had recently relocated to Houston from San Antonio to work for Deborah Colton at her new gallery space... he eventually sent us over to the project space (where the prior incarnation of her gallery had been) and we were treated to David Adickes presidential busts-- another truly wonderful surprise! The recent hurricane had blown Beatle Paul McCartney over-- somewhat apparent in the picture above.  

here's Jay next to one of his favorite presidents

The rest of our visit passed quickly by way of brunch with cousins, meeting Meg Poissant and her dogs at her gallery space and showing her some of my video work, breakfast with our good friend Tish Stringer and her chip-off-the-old-block daughter (sharp as her mom!), dinner with Patrick Kwaitikowski and his beautiful family, and generally paying witness to hurricane damage in the physical realm and through everyone's stories.

Media Archeology

Here's Andrea Grover, Aurora Picture Show Artistic Director, introducing Negativland at Rice University. What's that super-fashionable headband thing on her head? Its a special blindfold handed out to everyone at the door in order to block out all of that distracting knob-twiddling to enable full surrender to the aural cut-and-paste extravaganza of Negativland's 2-hour live-broadcast set.

Found sound montage on God and religion punctuated by regular radio-announcer-style interruptions, reminding listeners that we were tuned in to "Its All in Your Head Radio." The highlight of the show was getting to see Mark Hosler behave like a monkey.



Brent Green performing at the Orange Show, a historical folk art treasure obsessively built by a man who worshipped the orange. The space is just right for the flavor of Brent's story-telling alongside his animations, backed up by his band-- charming, coarse around the edges, spontaneous, and full of humor and poetry.

Brent being interviewed after his show by someone sporting one of those flip video cameras. Talking with the camerawoman a little later, she raved about the ease of use and surprisingly good quality of the video image.

The top-notch gaffer job laid by Guy, #1 Volunteer Worker Bee of the Aurora Picture Show. Notice the precise parallel of the cables running across the brickwork, then up the side of the performance ring, held spot on by three perfect tape strips. Once inside the ring, the cables turn to spaghetti.



Last visit to the EAI library in NYC, I had the good folks there pull a respectably long list of material for my viewing mission, most memorable were the episodes from Shana Moulton's 'Whispering Pines' series. Her live performance, 'Cynthia's Moment,' at black box theater Diverseworks, expanded the strangely unique digital kitch of that single channel work into the present moment.


And finally, 'Putting the Balls Away' is a meticulously executed tennis match by Tara Mateik in which s/he reenacts parts of the infamous Billy Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs match to the original audio of the sports broadcast coverage of the 1973 Houston game. Mateik's smart and impressively implemented performance brings into play contemporary aspects of gender struggle.


An awesome and much appreciated showcase of contemporary moving image practice curated by Nick Hallett and Andrea Grover-- I can't wait until next year's Media Archeology installment!