Sunday @ 6 PM Selfsick
TRT 71:11 min.
What I'm Looking For  - Shelly Silver      2004                  15:00
A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy in public space. She takes to hanging out with her camera on the streets of NYC, and since so much of the social has moved to the Internet, she starts approaching people through a profile on an Internet dating service. In this ad she states ‘I am looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves…’ What I’m Looking For documents this adventure, the strange intimacies and connections formed at this intersection between virtual and actual public space. The video is a rumination on the nature of photography; the persistence of vision; a short tale of desire and control.

Shelly Silver is a New York based artist utilizing video, film and photography. Her work, which spans a wide range of subject matter and genres, explores the connections that bind and restrict us; the varied routes of pleasure and desire; the stories that are told about us and the stories we construct about ourselves. She has been exhibited throughout the US, Europe and Asia at venues such as MoMA, NYC; MoCA, LA; The Pompidou Center, Paris; The Kyoto Museum, Japan, The ICA London; The London Film Festival; The Singapore Film Festival and has won many awards including The Golden Dove for Best Long Form Documentary at The Leipzig International Documentary Festival, Best Narrative at The Australian Int'l Film & Video Festival and The Houston Int'l Film Festival and Jury Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival Media Forum. Silver has received numerous fellowships and grants including from the NEA, the DAAD, NYSCA, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation. Broadcasts incude BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte/Germany, France, Planete/Europe, RTE/Ireland, SWR/Germany, Atenor/Spain. She is a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She currently teaches at The Cooper Union and the MFA Department of Photography and Related Media, The School of Visual Arts.

swf, 29, seeks self - Gretchen Skogerson      2004                     9:00

swf, 29, seeks self tackles attraction and repulsion and the search for one's "other half." The video contrasts educational film footage and messages culled from a personal ad against a story of loss.

Gretchen Skogerson explores the fabrication and deconstruction of boundaries through video, interactive installation and performance. She teaches at Mass College of Art.

We Are Each Other - Josh Weinstein      2005                  20:00

We Are Each Other is an exploration of the boundaries between self and other, identity and transference. It is a psychological game of hide and seek, a portrait of what we each bring to our interactions and how easily the lines between us blur. After years of producing corporate documentaries and conducted countless interviews I wanted to see what would happen when the tables were turned.

Josh Weinstein has a relentless curiosity about the inherent paradoxes of identity and perception and is obsessed with understanding how we know what we know about each other. He does a lot of social experiments, some involving video and spends part of his time bringing art to corporations. He was awarded a residency at Experimental Television Center in 2004. He created Inside Cinema in 2000, which is devoted to using documentary video as a tool for self-reflection within organizations.

3 into 1 - Oriana Fox      2005               6:30

For 3 into 1, the most self-referential work I have made, I interviewed each of my parents, my mother, my father and my stepmother, asking them to speak about me, my personality and our relationships with one another. In the video, I act as them, wearing their clothes, mimicking their gestures, and sitting in their respective homes. Most importantly, I lip-synch their words as they describe me with both candor and humor. Switching roles between the three, I attempt to find the truth of my self, ending up in an almost hysterical flipping between them.

Oriana Fox was born in New York in 1978, where she continues to live and work. She received a BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and went on to earn an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London in 2003. Since graduating she has shown her work in galleries and film festivals throughout the UK and US including the Video Biennale at Temporary Contemporary in London which traveled to venues in China and Germany. She received an award for Best Experimental Video Art at the Short Ends World Film Festival held at the ICA in London. Currently, Fox works primarily in video, using lip-synching and appropriation to tackle subjects such as the self-representation of feminist artists and TV’s role as mythmaker.

Tecendo - Jessica Mein       2005                   03:31

The artist employs the traditional structure of lace-making from her family in Brazil as a visual construction and deconstruction with language as pattern. In Tecendo (which means ‘weaving’), the artist weaves visually and orally the text with alternating Portuguese and English, following a lace pattern. As she describes her grandmother’s alphabetization in Brazil, she offers enough words in each language for the narrative to be comprehended, even though the text is not repeated nor translated from one language to another.

Jessica Mein was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She has shown at the Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Campinas and Museu de Arte de Ribeirao Preto in Brazil. Last year she participated in a group show at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Duke University and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Hunter College. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Bon Vivant - Jordan Stein     2005                    7:10

WWII Bomber pilot; tire business titan; 1998 Senior Olympic gold metal Butterfly-stroke winner. At 83, he hits an Everlast speed bag 2000 times a day, swims laps while you’re sleeping, and drives his 15-year-old son to tennis lessons. When he can, he spends time at his Barbados villa, Bon Vivant, exercising and driving unsafely surrounded by friends, family, and business partners. So why can’t his grandson make a simple movie about him on a simple vacation to the Caribbean?

Jordan Stein received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. In San Francisco, he has shown at the de Young Art Center, the Luggage Store Gallery, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. He is a 2004 recipient of the Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts. Chet Baker and distant cousins have been the subjects of his recent film and video work.

We Are The Littletons - Penny Lane       2005                     10:00

A tangled web of found objects, intercepted correspondences, reenactments and total fabrications centered around Eve Littleton, an artist with “movie star good looks” mysteriously banished from her postcard-perfect American family.  Video artist Penny Lane spent a year in Eve’s former bedroom, poring through the detritus of her life in the Littleton family. The deeper Penny dug into their family history, the more bizarre the story grew… and the more she came to believe that she and Eve shared a baffling connection. 

Penny Lane is an independent video artist and documentarian living in upstate New York. Most of her work seems to end up being about motherhood, no matter where it starts. She is currently the director/editor of The Abortion Diaries, a documentary about women's experiences with abortion . Her collaborative and solo video work has shown at Rotterdam Int'l Film Festival, San Francisco Int’l Film Festival, Seattle Int'l Film Festival, MOMA, Women in the Director’s Chair, Santa Fe Art Institute, and on Deep Dish TV.