Snow Mountain Ranch is a meditation on the elasticity of time and the veracity of representation. The focus is on careful observation and on a tension between the static and the dynamic. Shot from the patio of my hotel room at a YMCA Resort located just down the road from Camp Chief Ouray in Granby, Colorado, where I spent two summers a boy. The video begins as a single continuous take. We are witness to two unfolding narratives, happening at very different scales, the action of the weather and that of the cowboys. Both the movements of the sky and the action on the ground have been accelerated but not always to the same degree.
Video by viDEO sAVant. Music by The Ubudis Quartet. The Ubudis Quartet combines Mexican guitarist Omar Tamez with Buffalo-based musicians Steve Baczkowski (saxophones, clarinets, and ethnic woodwinds), Jonathan Golove (electric cello), and John Bacon (percussion). Performed at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, this video presents a five minute edited sample of the Live Cinema performance.
Three part work created for my exhibition at Shirley Jones Gallery in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Features dance treatments from Experimental Television Center, as well as footage from my backyard on Riddle Rd in Cincinnati. The piece was projected onto the store front windows of the gallery.
Demo version of my first attempt at a multi-channel video installation. The work was highly influenced by Nam June Paik’s retrospective at the Whitney and by Steina Vasulka’s “The West”. This piece was produced while I was living and working at the Vasulka’s House/Studio in Santa Fe. I had persuaded them to let me house sit while they spent six months in Japan. Access to their equipment, particularly to 4 adjacent monitors and four ¾” video decks, was what made it possible to compose a multi image work. “Virtual Space” was originally an eight channel work, mounted as two 2X2 stacks of monitors facing each other across a narrow space. Standing in the middle, the viewer had to look back and forth between the two sides. One side (L) is an assembly of footage gathered at the Lightning Field (a land art project in southern New Mexico by artist Walter Di Maria.) The other side (V) features four views of the interior of the Vasulka’s live/work interior as a handheld camera slowly and continuously pans across interior surfaces in the space.
A mostly formal exercise in composition and image processing, using footage of water. Probably the first in a ongoing series of works dealing with landscape, investigating the idea of video as a contemplative viewing experience akin to painting. Filmed in California and Mexico, Developed over the course of two visits to ETC, Final editing at PPG onto 1” open reel tape.
Produced while I was living in Washington DC. This is a meditation on highway architecture and the view from moving cars, subjects that have long been dear to me. Shot on Hi8 with footage processed at ETC and in my studio using the Amiga computer.
I was fascinated by the photos on gravestones in the Cemetery at San Minato in Florence, Italy. I began to think about the way in which a single image came to represent the entire lived experience of the person. Cinema as a whole also seems to be about representations of actions. I wondered about trying to film an experience directly lived as opposed to being represented. "I Morti" presents four streams of diary footage, images of daily life and travel. Collected over a 4 or 5 year period, these function as a counterpoint to the images of the dead on the fifth screen.
My first multi channel work for synchronized video streams. The piece starts in Cape Cod and moves gradually across the North American continent, ending at the Pacific Ocean. There is no attempt to cover all this of ground in any compete way - the work is an assembly of the places I traveled to and landscapes I admired during the four-year period in which I collected the material. All the scenes were shot with a single camera, then staggered in editing to create the appearance of a continuous shot. During filming I would pan, pause, and then move again, resulting in a series of staggered movements in which the different screens appear to drift in and out of synchronization. Installed at El Camino Medical Center in Mountain View, California.
My first multi channel works for synchronized video streams. The piece starts in Cape Cod and moves gradually across the North American continent, ending at the Pacific Ocean. There is no attempt to cover all this of ground in any compete way - the work is an assembly of the places I traveled to and landscapes I admired during the four-year period in which I collected the material. All the scenes were shot with a single camera, then staggered in editing to create the appearance of a continuous shot. During filming I would pan, pause, and then move again, resulting in a series of staggered movements in which the different screens appear to drift in and out of synchronization.