Author: DC (Page 328 of 1067)

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Andrei Molodkin The White House Filled With the Blood of U.S. Citizens, 2020
‘Amid the final days of the Trump administration, Russian-born conceptual artist Andrei Molodkin has projected a video of his political artwork, White House Filled with the Blood of U.S. Citizens, onto the Trump Hotel in Washington, DC. In the large-scale video, blood is seen flooding through an acrylic model of the building.

‘As the title suggests, this (real) blood was donated by US citizens – more specifically, volunteers at the American Church in Paris, France, where Molodkin is based. “The use of human blood is required to interrogate the existing political system,” the artist explains in a statement. “The White House is the symbolic heart of ‘Western’ democracy, and here we see it as it is, fueled by the blood of its citizens.”’

 

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Buryanyk Vasylyna Tears That Solidify and Blood That Doesn’t Clot, 2020
1700х1200х1300 mm, glass, metal, blood, fabric

 

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Sun Yuan and Peng Yu Body Link, 2000
‘The conceptual artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu transfused one hundred centiliters of their own blood into a medical specimen of abdominally conjoined fetal twins. In photographs taken during the show, the artists sit on either side of a table with blood tubing connecting their arms to the mouths of the twins where it overflows, drenching the bodies.’

 

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Casey Koyczan Residential Values, 2014
Performance Painting, Red + White + Black paint on canvas, Hockey Pucks

 

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Mac Blondie Untitled, 2014
‘A French tumblr artist taking the name of Mac Blondie has taken the idea of art to the next level in his latest art series by punching a brick wall covered with a canvas with his bare hands. The entire process took five minutes while the artist punched the canvas 569 times.’

 

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Pete Doherty Bilo Ireland Blood, 2007
Artist’s blood on on wove paper

 

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Adel Abdessemed Forbidden Colours, 2018
‘Forbidden Colours reflect our current world flooded with fake news. These abstract canvases play with the ambiguity of blood, even though they are painted with a liquid used in cinema to simulate wounds or death in a hyperrealistic way. Adel Abdessemed takes us into a world of simulation and illusion, in the age of manipulated images or photoshopped photographs that seem more real than reality itself.’

 

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Shary Boyle Flesh and Blood, 2012
Porcelain, enamel, glaze and glass beads

 

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Tameka Norris Untitled, 2012
‘She cuts her tongue with the single stroke of a knife blade and drags it deliberately along the gallery wall, replacing brush and paint with her mouth and bodily fluids. Tameka Norris’s untitled performance tests not only the artist’s ability to tolerate pain but also the audience’s ability to bear witness to pain.’

 

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Mary Coble Blood Script, 2008
‘Artist Mary Coble was lying face down on a table in the Conner Contemporary Art booth at the Pulse Fair in New York. A tattoo artist moved a buzzing needle over her flesh, drawing blood, as people strolled past clutching gallery brochures and occasionally paused to watch. Coble is a tough-looking gal with a buzz haircut but I thought she was going to bite her own forearm off in agony. In Coble’s performance, Blood Script, the artist had hate speech inklessly tattooed on her body in ornate script. An assistant pressed paper against Coble’s bleeding flesh and made prints of the ugly epithets. Yikes. The performance and the spectators’ reactions could be a metaphor for any number of things and you could also view it as a sensationalistic attention-getting stunt. I never made up my mind about it because I really couldn’t bear to nonchalantly stand and watch somebody purposely endure that kind of pain just for art.’

 

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Poppy Koning Guts Over Fear, 2016
‘Meet ‘Guts Over Fear’ the painting that contains my own blood. What can I say? I adore blood and I’m not the only one. Yeah, I like blood, fake blood mostly. Yes, I drew my own blood for my painting. And yes, it’s absolutely beautiful, the painting, but also blood. The intense red shade, the structure is has, the passion that speaks from the color.. ah, perfection.’

 

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‘After multidisciplinary Singaporean contemporary artist S. Chandrasekaran was denied an opportunity to perform an element of his Singapore Biennale work Unwalked Boundaries by the organisers, the 57-year-old performed a dramatic blood oath ceremony this afternoon (Oct 28) during his artist talk segment, expressing his disappointment and declaring that he will not perform again until he was allowed to perform this particular piece. “I’m making a blood oath today, that I will never perform in Singapore until this is performed. And every day I will mark my skin, a scar, until I (get to) perform. This is my oath.”’

Videos and more here

 

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Maxime André Taccardi Untitled, 2012
‘Musician, artist, teacher and husband, Maxime André Taccardi has dedicated his last years to a whole new level of artist introspection and self-enlightenment, starting as the creator of paints made with his own blood, passing through the creation and reflections of our own decadence as humans, he has invented even music that can transport you to realms far beyond and over the understanding of the common human race.’

 

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Nick van Woert Reappear, 2012
fiberglass statue, polyurethane, steel

 

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Marianna Simnett Blood, 2015
‘Isabel undergoes surgery to remove two turbinate bones from her nose. This procedure eerily restages a horrifically botched operation carried out on Emma Eckstein, a patient of Sigmund Freud. Isabel’s suffering induces vivid dreams involving a visit to a remote village in northern Albania. In that archaic land of blood feuds and strict codes of honour a woman is regarded as ‘a sack made to endure’. Isabel’s ambiguous mentor, who became a sworn virgin to escape such a fate, tends to the child’s swollen nose while back at home Isabel’s schoolfriends, masquerading as her rejected turbinate bones, torment and chastise her. Both predicaments are fraught; after experiencing an epic nosebleed, Isabel is horrified at what is happening and finds herself again in Albania, endlessly sleepwalking.’

Watch it here

 

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Oleg Vdovenko Stork, 2019
2D-3D artist from Saint Petersburg, Russia

 

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Wang Jie Illusionary Space Writing I & II, 2013
acrylic on acrylic

 

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Shintaro Kago Untitled, 1998
ink and pencil on paper

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Rebecca Belmore Various, 2002 – 2008
‘Belmore’s symbolic wounding, entrapment, and exposure of her body in attempted solidarity with those whose bodies have been destroyed make poignant a chasm that cannot be bridged. Her alternately narcissistic and self-abusive performances thus operate in critical dialogue not only with the demands upon artists of aboriginal backgrounds to somehow be representative “aboriginal artists” but also with the polemics of the presentation of the female body.’

Fringe

Blood on the Snow

Fountain

 

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‘In Naruto Fanon the Genjutsu: Blood Release is a technique of Muketsu’s that enhances his already significant prowess within Genjutsu. By making contact with an enemy through one of the plethora of weapons he has available through his manipulation over blood, Muketsu can impart his own blood into an opponent. This leaves a small quantity of chakra within an opponent’s body. In doing so, Muketsu is able to subsequently direct his own chakra into an opponent’s brain with much more ease as a result of some chakra already being present to accelerate and empower the Genjutsu being cast.’

 

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‘Ruby “Juice” Martinez is a 29-year-old local artist who has a gory, but not unusual, twist on creating art: using her own blood as paint. The blood the artist uses is pulled directly from her veins using a syringe, which is then placed in a two-ounce container with an anticoagulant that she eventually discovered. “You can add as much blood on one layer, but you won’t get much shading out of it until you let it dry and let new blood absorb into the canvas,” Martinez said. “Although the blood does have an anticoagulant, my time is still limited so I try to work at a fast pace.” The blood is applied through various tools, such as paint brushes and sponges, in order to apply texture, and finger-painting for backgrounds. “One thing I love about El Paso (is that) the art community is very supportive of each other,” said Martinez who was searching somewhere to keep her art after finding out she would be moving to Alaska.’

 

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Teresa Margolles Lemas (Mottos), 2009
Fabric impregnated with blood gathered from the places where murders took place in Mexico.

 

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Kristian von Hornsleth Hornsleth’s Head, 2019
Sculpture

 

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Jordan Eagles Blood Equality Illuminations, 2017
‘Blood Equality Illuminations unites 59 voluntary human blood donations from the MSM (men who have sex with men) community. The donations came from two groups – the first from nine individuals, each with unique life experiences and perspectives, highlighting the repercussions of the ban and the importance of full equality, and the second group combined blood from a community of 50 PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis – a daily pill proven to be 99.9% effective in preventing HIV transmission. For Blood Equality Illuminations this blood was scanned and printed as digital composites and then projected onto surfaces to create an immersive installation. Through the projection you can ‘step into’ the blood – blood which could have been used medically and given to someone in need by way of a selfless act.’

 

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Kim Morgan Blood Cluster, 2015
Glass, metal, lightbulbs, wire, blood

 

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Catherine Opie Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993
‘In Self Portrait/Cutting, the artist depicts herself life-size from the waist up, in front of a baroquely elaborate backdrop. Yet she is shirtless and faces away from the camera, revealing a drawing, still bleeding, that has been scratched into her back; her own skin has been used as a canvas. The cutting depicts in childlike glyphs a tranquil scene of lesbian home life, but the drawing’s tender and sympathetic tone is disrupted by the raw, visceral means through which it was created, undermining any possibility of interpreting the scene as a simple, unfettered image of domestic normalcy.’

 

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Louie Cordero My We, 2011
‘The work of Filipino artist Louie Cordero embodies contemporary Manila culture by mixing together indigenous traditions, spanish catholicism and american pop culture. His cast fiberglass figures are graphically and fantastically impaled with as many ‘first-world’ cast off objects as could be found. Blending visceral gore with seductive color and highly refined technique, Cordero’s work draws on the aesthetics of b-movie horror films, heavy metal music, comics, local stories, street life and various mythologies offering a highly personal, idiosyncratic take on a chaotic world.’

 

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Basse Stittgen Record and Player, 2017
‘The slaughterhouse industry is one of the most resource intensive in the world, yet it remains almost invisible – this disconnection makes it difficult to create a common ground to talk about the ethics of production and consumption. The work offers a platform for confrontation and reflection regarding our relation towards animals. All the objects are made 100% from discarded cowblood.’

 

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Tim Noble & Sue Webster Bloody Haemorrhaging Narcissus, 2009
Red silicone rubber, steel, wood, light projector

 

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Jonathan Schipper Raining Blood, 2010
‘The band Slayer’s song Raining Blood is translated to player piano reel. A classical reproduction sculpture reconfigured and modified with pneumatics to allow for movement. A hand built reader reads the song and the controls the gyrations of the figure.’

 

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Imran Qureshi Blessings on the Land of My Love, 2011
gouache and gold leaf on wasli paper

 

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‘BBDO Russia Group has been creating art from ‘post-bite’ mosquitoes that have been squashed, to promote Glorix mosquito repellent. The process involves firstly slapping a mosquito just after it has bitten and is therefore full of blood. An artist then paints a portrait using the ‘splatted’ blood.’

 

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Gina Pane Psyche, 1974
‘French artist Gina Pane was a founder and leading member of Art Corporel, the Body Art Movement in France during the 1970s, and throughout all of her work she uses the body as a site for exploring ideas around discomfort, experience and empathy. She is best known for personally inflicted physical suffering. In the performance of Psyche in 1974, she stood in front of a mirror where she used a razor blade to make incisions onto her face and navel. The cuts below her eyebrows caused her to blood to trickle down the face like scarlet tears.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m not sure because even thinking about it freaks me out so much that I can’t even analyse it, ha ha. I know more than a few people who share that fear of yours, and it’s true I have a deathly fear of the idea of being out in the middle of the ocean in the water at the foot/bottom of a huge ship, so I shudder along with you. Thank your Love of yesterday for his benevolence. I am reliving a fantasy of my youth of eating an entire wedding cake by myself. Wedding cakes, at least in the US, are literally 98% sugar. Love helping me choose what to read from ‘I Wished’ at a LGBTQ bookstore event on Thursday that won’t piss off the attendees because that’s happened to me at LGBTQ bookstore events many times before, G. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! I do sometimes miss comments when they appear while I’m doing the p.s, sorry. I’m very happy that the Akerman film was a find for you. Thank you for the two music tips! I’ll get right on them. Right, I need to do the Mego Part 2 gig, thanks for reminding me. There are going to be three big Mego tribute live gigs in Paris, I think later this year, at the Pompidou, Gaite Lyrique, and I forget the third venue. Thank you about ‘Jerk’. And for the BJA documentary tip. I didn’t know about that. I would so love to have my blog remixed, wow. It would be hard to do, what with my poor archiving skills. I’ve never been in parc de la Courneuve. How can that be? It looks super serene and inviting. I love your films list, of course. Breer! Lockhart! Etc. There are definitely ones on yours that should have been on mine. It’s possible I was at that same Benning screening. The host did make sheepish remarks right before the screening started that I didn’t understand. And, yeah, counterproductive. So good to see you, my friend! ** David Ehrenstein, Macron is worse than a subpar politician, his policies are often dreadful, but that doesn’t lessen the huge relief at escaping Le Pen, of course. ** Misanthrope, Me too. I don’t know how I keep finding new stuff all the time either. It’s weird. Btw, I have a little, or not so little, blast from the past coming up for you tomorrow. Well, I guess your dickishness is balanced out by the fact that you like some really crappy stuff, ha ha. Actually, Le Pen did try to focus on things people here care about here in her campaign, which is why she did as well as she did, but she didn’t make enough people believe her racism and homophobia and love of authoritarianism, etc. was actually in her past, which is why she lost. ** Svartvit, Hi, Svartvit. Thanks for coming back! Oh, cool. About the museum work having an excitement factor. I think the people I’ve known who’ve worked in museums in some capacity have said the same, if I’m remembering right. When I was growing up in SoCal, a lot of my friends had summer jobs working at Disneyland, and, to a one, that ended up ruining their appreciation of amusement parks forever, so I’m glad it’s not like that. I’ll look up Voorlinden. I hope the Gormley exhibition is a pleasure to install, and, of course, see. Thanks a lot! Take care ’til hopefully next time. ** _Black_Acrylic, I would so love to go to a really extravagant, old school, visually over the top rave. Sigh. Yeah, I’ve never bought anything more substantial than a car in my life, but I can imagine. I hope the paperwork is rapidly finite. ** Okay. Today you get a sequel to a post from a few years ago called Bloody, not that anyone out there has been on the edge of their seat waiting for Bloody II, but here’s hoping it’s a surprise hit. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Born in 1967, Deborah Stratman is an American filmmaker and artist who participates in a form of experimental, and ethnographic, filmmaking. This article provides an introduction to her filmography, and the subjects and themes she explores through her films.

‘Stratman is a Chicago-based filmmaker who leaves town a lot. Her films blur the lines between experimental and documentary genres, and she frequently works in other media including photography, sound, drawing and architectural intervention. Her films, rather than telling stories, pose a series of problems – and through their at times ambiguous nature, allow for a complicated reading of the questions being asked. Many of her films point to the relationships between physical environments and the very human struggles for power, ownership, mastery and control that are played out on the land. Most recently, they have questioned elemental historical narratives about freedom, expansion, security, and the regulation of space.

‘Stratman received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). During her time there, she studied under the experimental filmmaker, James Benning, whose work often explores landscapes, time, and duration, and who Stratman often sites as an influence. For just about the past three decades, Stratman’s multifarious body of work has not only included films but also sculpture, photography, drawing, and sound installations.

‘Most of the films Stratman has created extend from an intersection between the avant-garde and documentary. In particular, many of her films are concerned with the ways in which our physical environment is entangled with the notions of surveillance, privacy, and, control. She is particularly interested in utilising the duality of sound, as a mode of control and resistance, to explore the environments featured in her films. Further to this, Stratman strives to divine a non-linguistic epistemology through her film’s distinct sonic landscape, something she describes as ‘a kind of knowing that is just as intellectual but is not tied to words.

‘United primarily by an inquisitive approach that fuses the heart of a poet with the mind of a scientist, artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman’s works engage a staggering range of concerns, geographies, and forms. The dominant impulse underlying her practice is a desire to reach an understanding of a subject, whether it is an astronomical phenomenon—the comets of . . . These Blazeing Starrs!, 2011, for example—or an ontological condition, such as freedom (O’er the Land, 2009). Some questions are, of course, unanswerable, and Stratman’s research rarely results in resolution. For the artist, understanding is always provisional, a benchmark at which new mysteries emerge and opportunities for poetics arise.’ — collaged

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Deborah Stratman Site
DS @ Lightcone
DS @ Video Data Bank
DS @ IMDb
Filmmaker Profile: Deborah Stratman
On the Various Nature of Things: Deborah Stratman
Travel to Places “Heavy With History” in Deborah Stratman’s Films
DS @ This Long Century
DS @ Instagram
What Is Felt Cannot Be Forgotten: an interview with Deborah Stratman
A staggering new film tells the story of faith in America
VOLUMES AND PRESSURES: DEBORAH STRATMAN with Aily Nash
Short Take: The Illinois Parables
MAXIMUM MINIMALISM. A conversation with Deborah Stratman
Deborah Stratman by Pamela Cohn
Interview with Deborah Stratman By Julie Perini
On Deborah Stratman
DEBORAH STRATMAN, THE EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARIAN

 

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Extras

Filmmaker Profile: Deborah Stratman

Talk: Deborah Stratman

Masterclass: Deborah Stratman

Final Draft: Deborah Stratman on Film

 

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Interview

 

E: The sonic dimension of your work suggests a rigorous modeling of the relationships between recording-event and the representation of place, experience, concept. Examples range from the matter-of-fact, ‘indexical’ presentation of the sounds of the shooting location in The Illinois Parables (2016), to the use of something like continuity sound in the barroom scene in Optimism (2018), to sounds that are almost in direct confrontation with the content of the images, as in On the Various Nature of Things (1995). Some of your films, like Hacked Circuit (2014), even directly comment on the construction and manipulation of “real” sound through highly manipulated sound. In Order to Not Be Here (2002) integrates Kevin Drumm’s electronic pulsations into the sound mix, to harrowing and immersive effect. How would you describe your approach to recording and representing place and experience through sound? Is it specific to each film, or are you doing something more programmatic? Does this approach have political, ethical or personal implications (insofar as these can be considered separate)?

DS: Sound makes space. Is space. Is nothing without space. Sound is expressed through and changed by space. I love making space with sound which is just making forms with time. It’s the ultimate temporal sculpture medium. When you ask about approach, that’s how I’d describe my primary relationship.

But there’s lots of other relationships that define the ways I like to work with sound that have to do with, say, memory – the way rhythm makes things indelible – tone, humor, augury/foreboding, transposition, rupture, setting background or defining a protagonist – to me melody can be a formidable protagonist. Though in terms of inclination, I’m more a ground than a figure person.

Political-ethical-personal, absolutely the aural has repercussions here. But so does the image. So does everything really. I don’t think I approach ethics more pointedly or successfully in one or the other.

E: Loving this equation of making sound-space (sound=space) and making time-form as a way to think cinema-making. It feels axiomatic. The relationship of memory to this is interesting as well – thinking cinematic devices as translating feeling-tone and rhythmic nuances of memory (maybe we could provisionally define memory as the palpable absence of a particular listening?) into time-forms.

Of course, some have made analogies between elements of your work and that of Straub and Huillet, but the incongruities are maybe more interesting here than the comradeship. In any given film of theirs, it seems that sound-space is always doing a kind of double duty: acting as index of the immediate conditions of its recording in a given place at a given time (no dubbing or continuity) and as index of some essentially inaccessible social-historical past (which is always a function of the former duty: locations chosen, conflicts between images, sounds, etc.). Of course they pushed this very far: you can find Straub moralizing against the use of cinematic imagination and “formless form,” shots essentially become blocks of documentary-time, absolute fidelity is emphasized.

Your work also seems to be mobilized against historical amnesia, and totally conscious of place and time of recording, but far more willing to play with interpretation, manipulation, recreation, feeling of memory. Are your time- forms built in fidelity to some primary act of listening (or remembering), or are they building something else entirely?

DS: That parenthetical definition of memory makes me think of Merleau-Ponty’s description of a ghost as a perception made by only one sense. Apropos when we’re talking alongside the great phantom, cinema.

I’m on board to think about memory as the absence of a particular listening. Or maybe any listening….? The radical thing about listening, like Salomé Voegelin says, is that it must share time and space with the object or event under consideration. It’s a philosophical project that demands involved participation. There’s no detachment. It’s not the ‘over there’ that vision gives us, but an in-the-midst. Which is what makes listening such a good locus for the socio- political. On the other hand, sound is an intriguingly obstinate and malleable arena through which to take on history, because if we’re listening to something, it’s unfurling. It’s never a static artefact.

Straub-Huillet are very important for me, but I’m happy you mention the incongruities. What idiom and dialect convey is immeasurable; a sub-surface mix of cadence, inheritance, geography, epoch… I think there’s a connection here to what I aim towards in constructing time-forms. An idiomatic erratic product of the dance I perform with my material. Most of the time, the only things my time-forms are built in fidelity to is themselves. Sometimes not even that. Though if they’re well-made, there’s an allegiance to the unfurling present and to the remembered/recorded past. Or to forecast. History and augury are equally productive companions to the moment.

Often my work grows out of a primary act of noticing. Might be a passage of music, an illustration, a story told… But I’m not interested in fidelity to the thing as I came across it, or as I thought it. Like our buddy Walt Benjamin says, nothing’s poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. It’s best if my ideas get snagged or interrupted by the world. I’m happy when subjects get in my way and become interlocutors. That’s why I’m drawn to modes like documentary, where chance has a seat at the table.

E: I’d like to zoom in for a moment on the triple relationship of what you call augury/forecast, history/past and the moment/present in your time-forms, and specifically this figure of augury as opposed to history. History – and correct me if I am misinterpreting! – seems to be analogized with past time, which may or may not be “remembered” via the perpetual “moment” of the screen, the recording, etc. There also seems to be a necessary relationship here between contingency and the representation of history, or even a parallel between chance and the realm of history generally. But what exactly is this third element, forecast or augury, in your time-forms? What are its implications? By augury, do you mean eschatology, soothsaying, editorializing, utopian projection, a gesture ‘off-screen’? To bring this closer to Voeglin’s discourse as you mention it, is augury a kind of listening for?

DS: It’s all those things and more. Forecasting is sort of like remembering, except you’re walking backwards into it, and there aren’t any leavings available to sift through. When I use the word augury, I’m talking about projecting. It’s anticipatory and conjectural. It could be tied to signs of narrative or melodic convention. It could be speculation based on cadence, or a product of pressures built though editing, setting, gesture, framing, what’s beyond the frame, etc. Without augury there’s no suspense, or surprise, or rhythm. There’s a channelizing of attention, or yes – a listening for. I believe in listening. Radical listening. Attentiveness is powerful. Observation, in its potential to cede space and agency, is powerful. We should question the habitual. Question bricks. Question the height of the curb. Which station our radio gets left tuned to. The route we favor. Notice who speaks. Who gets the last word.

E: All fascinating. In terms of method, do you often shoot and then edit footage years later?

DS: Sometimes I work very quick. Like sketching. But at least half of the time I shoot and either don’t return to material until years later, or am working on it sort of continuously, but over a very long time.

E: What’s the utility of this?

DS: Alienation. The footage feels less mine if it ages. The shots get detached from the experience that generated the desire to shoot them in the first place. Some things sit because I never had plans for them. I just shoot what moves me then add it to the shelf – something I can tap later when the right idea comes along. Other times I’m clear on what I should do, but the thing I’m trying to make is obstinate. And then other times, I aim for as little thinking as possible—hold the camera like the net.

 

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18 of Deborah Stratman’s 42 films

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Waking (1994)
‘A video in two parts about two states (being asleep and being awake) and the absurdity, or even impossibility, of bridging between them. The camera becomes a microscope examining light as if it were a state of mind.’ — vdb

Watch an excerpt here

 

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From Hetty to Nancy (1997)
‘The stoic beauty the Icelandic landscape forms a backdrop for a series of witty and caustic letters written at the turn of the century by a woman named Hetty as she treks with her companion Masie, four school girls and their school marm. The film juxtaposes Hetty’s ironic cataloguing of the petty social interactions of her companions as they endure discomfort and boredom with historic accounts of catastrophes that reveal the Icelandic people subject to the awesome forces of nature.’ — dafilms

Watch the entirety here

 

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The BLVD (1999)
‘With a painter’s eye and a storyteller’s love of the great yarn, Stratman gives us a portrait of a sub-culture inside Chicago’s Black community that really puts us in that place at that time. …Stratman brings her own personality to the work and interaction with the filmmaker becomes an important part of her telling of the tale. Stratman’s love of detail and of her subjects, not to mention their respect for her in return, give BLVD an immediacy that transcends any technology.’ — Mark Rance, Film Forum

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Untied (2001)
‘A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy, and of breaking free from abusive cycles. Made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left Stratman broken, dislocated, and stuck in her apartment.’ — vdb

Watch an excerpt here

 

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In Order Not To Be Here (2002)
‘An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness… an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.’ — Tenk

the entirety

 

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Energy Country (2003)
‘The frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry and the religious right are woven through the petrochemical landscapes of Southeast Texas. This short video harangue questions land use policy as it serves the oil industry, patriotism as it absolves foreign aggression, and fundamentalism as it calcifies thinking.’ — vdb

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Kings of the Sky (2004)
‘Deborah Stratman, who specializes in experimental documentaries, spent four months with tightrope walker Adil Hoxur – cited in the Guinness Book of World Records and the latest descendant of a family of tightrope performers over many centuries – as he and his troupe toured Chinese Turkestan and performed nightly in small villages. Among his biggest fans are fellow Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy. Stratman emphasizes the everyday over the exotic, a consistently fresh and personal way of relating to the material; she trusts viewers to make many of the right connections but never comes across as esoteric. Her sense of rhythm in this digital video, particularly evident in the way she edits and lingers over certain kinds of movement, is especially impressive.’ — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Watch an excerpt here

 

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It Will Die Out In The Mind (2006)
‘This film by Deborah Stratman is a short meditation on the possibility of spiritual existence and the paranormal in our information age. Texts are lifted from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film ‘Stalker’ in which the Stalker’s daughter redeems his otherwise doomed spiritual journey. She offers him something more expansive and less explicable than logic or technology as the conceptual pillar of the human spirit.’ — MoCA

the entirety

 

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O’er the Land (2008)
‘An experimental and haunting collection of vignettes, Deborah Stratman’s O’er the Land weaves several picturesque and arresting strands into an evocative essay on freedom as defined by The American Way. At once contemplative and jarring, the film quietly ricochets from one emblem of patriotism and of the American experience to the next: football, recreational vehicles, Civil War re-enactments, and war stories, to name a few. A recurring motif in the film is the story of Colonel William Rankin, a Marine pilot who in 1959 ejected from his F8-U fighter jet and parachuted into a thunderstorm 48,000 feet above Virginia. Incredibly, Col. Rankin remained aloft for nearly an hour, tossed by air pockets and electrical fields, before crashing to the ground and, miraculously, surviving. One might say O’er the Land keeps the viewer aloft for a turbulent and rapturous hour as well.’ — TM

the entirety

 

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Kuyenda n’kubvina (walking is dancing) (2010)
‘Kuyenda N’kubvina looks at how thought and culture propagate in the slender nation of Malawi. Weaving our way through video halls, book stores, dance floors and radio stations, in cities and small villages, we meet Malawians who traffic in ideas, reflecting the rhythms of Malawian contemporary life. The video was instigated by the filmmaker’s relative ignorance about the people and culture of southeast Africa, and accompanies her as she seeks out individuals and infrastructures that channel and articulate Malawian identity.’ — vdb

Watch the entirety here

 

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…These Blazeing Starrs! (2010)
‘Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th Century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.

‘…These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when we translated the sky to predict human folly. These days, comets are understood as time capsules harboring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. We smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, the remain oracles — it’s just the manner of divining which has changed.’ — vdb

Watch the entirety here

 

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The Name is not the Thing named (2012)
‘In support of experiences that are essentially common, but to which language does not easily adhere, the video passes through places that are both themselves, and stand-ins for others. The title is taken from Aleister Crowley’s 1918 translation of the Tao Te Ching.’ — vdb

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Hacked Circuit (2014)
‘A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The circular camera path moves us inside and back out of a Foley stage in Burbank, CA. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are, by extension and quotation, governmental violations of individual privacy.

‘The scene being foleyed is the final sequence from The Conversation where Gene Hackman’s character Harry Caul tears apart his room searching for a ‘bug’ that he suspects has been covertly planted. The look of Caul’s apartment as he tears it apart mirrors the visual chaos of the Foley stage. This mirroring is also evident in the dual portraits of sonic espionage expert Caul and Foley artist Gregg Barbanell, for whom professionalism is marked by an invisibility of craft. And in the doubling produced by Hackman’s second appearance as a surveillance hack, twenty-four years later in Enemy of the State.

‘These filmic quotations ground Hacked Circuit, evoking paranoia, and a sense of conviction alongside a lack of certainty about what is visible. The complication of the seen, the known, the heard and the undetectable provides thematic parallels between the stagecraft of Foley and a pervasive climate of government surveillance.’ — Ronan Doyle

Excerpt

 

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w/ Olivia Block Second Sighted (2024)
‘Deborah Stratman’s Second Sighted showcases an unforgettable array of audio and visual material, ranging from computer-generated images to archival footage of satellites. The film transcends time as it jumps between style and tone, combining the new and the old, accomplished through the use of footage found in the Chicago Film Archives accompanied by the work of composer Olivia Block. “Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape,” describes Stratman.’ — filmlinc

Excerpt

 

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The Illinois Parables (2016)
‘An experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. The state is a convenient structural ruse, allowing its histories to become allegories that explore how we’re shaped by conviction and ideology.

‘The film suggests links between technological and religious abstraction, placing them in conversation with governance. Locations are those where the boundaries between the rational and supernatural are tenuous. They are “thin places” where the distance between heaven and earth has collapsed, or more secularly, any place that bears a heavy past, where desire and displacement have lead us into or erased us from the land. What began as a consideration of religious freedom eventually led to sites where belief or invention triggered expulsion. The film utilizes reenactment, archival footage, observational shooting, inter-titles and voiceover to tell its stories and is an extension of previous works in which the director questioned foundational American tenants.

‘The Parables consider what might constitute a liturgical form. Not a sermon, but a form that questions what morality catalyzes, and what belief might teach us about nationhood. In our desire to explain the unknown, who or what do we end up blaming or endorsing?’ — vdb

Excerpt

Watch an excerpt here

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Xenoi (2016)
‘The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.’ — Letterboxd

Watch an excerpt here

UVP Insights: Debroah Stratman on Xenoi

 

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Siege (2017)
‘The SIEGE animations riff on the way the human brain makes spatial predictions about its surroundings in order to perceive the present. For best effect, stare at the center of the image then look away.’ — DS

the entirety

 

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Vever (for Barbara) (2019)
‘A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her gaze like an offered hand to a subject she is outside of. Vever (for Barbara) grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections on failure, encounter, and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m sure I’ve mentioned this, but when I’m watching a movie and there’s a scene when an astronaut is ‘space-walking’ or ‘repairing’ a ship’s exterior in outer space or things like that, I feel like I’m having a heart attack and a stroke at the same time. And it’s amazing how often I seem to wind up accidentally watching movies that have a scene like that. Thanks, your Love of Saturday was successful! It was really stressful ‘cos that outcome wasn’t for sure. Next is the parliamentary elections in six weeks, and hopes turn to keeping her party out and getting some Leftists in there. Love turning the streets of Paris into trampolines for 15 minutes, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, unfortunately we still have Macron, but the utter nightmare was averted, and more handily than had been feared. ** TomK, Hey, Yow, sounds so dreamy. I need me a bunch of those. And no need to worry, maestro. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. It’s still just as noisy, but the sounds of cars cover it up. So, how was the wunderkind’s performance? Macron wasn’t actually that far ahead in the polls, but the final results had him at a sufficient distance. ** Chris Kelso, Hi, Chris. So great to see you and talk with you! Thank you again! I didn’t have the wee-est problem understanding you, and anyway my disjointed LA drawl is no picnic, so thanks for hearing me. I love curating shows. I used to do it pretty regularly, and I miss it a lot. I need to focus my energies that way, but it’s hard with so many projects going on. Curating is a lot of work. But, yeah, I hope to get the chance to curate shows again. I have a bunch of ideas. Thanks! Have a spectacular week! ** Sypha, There are even more mocked up, faux 19th century Paris recreation things out there if you ever decide to write a sequel. Nice that the wedding sounds so pleasant. Star Wars music, ha ha. People love to dance, man. It’s true you don’t seem like a guy who longs to cut loose under a disco ball. Me either, duh. ** _Black__Acrylic, Good old France proved itself to be good old France yesterday, thank god, yes. ** Steve Erickson, I’ve said it before but ‘The Lighthouse’ was like a really shitty faux-Sam Shepard play that Eggers tried to smother into being more than that with the most overused AfterEffects humanly possible. Yeah, ‘a bit better’ isn’t enough incentive for me, but thanks for taking the bullet. Great about the Slant review. I’m one of those odd people who has never really liked Belle and Sebastian. They strike my ears as wispy clutter or something. No doubt I’m way off. ** Right. Today I focus on yet another really interesting filmmaker whom most of you have probably never heard of due at least partly to the conservatism and unimaginative practices of all but a very few film distribution companies and critics/venues whose job it is to alert and influence the filmgoing public. Hence, I hope you’ll take this opportunity. See you tomorrow.