On January 9, 2012, the amazing Dara Greenwald passed away at the age of 40 after battling cancer for over a year. Dara was an activist, video artist, writer, curator, researcher and all-around amazing person. I had the pleasure of meeting her years ago while I was an MFA student at the University of Buffalo and she was working on an MFA at RPI in Troy, NY. We ran into each other at various events on the east and west coasts, and I interviewed her for my chapter, “Art as Intervention: A Guide to Radical Art Today” for the book Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the US. Vanessa Renwick hosted a memorial service for Dara tonight and it was lovely to watch her videos with a crowd of people who also knew her and loved her. I want to point out a few of my favorite Dara videos to my blog followers:
It’s a good day when you come home to not one but two letters from the Regional Arts & Culture Council informing you that you’ve been awarded grants. One is a Professional Development Grant to support my travel to the Experiments in Cinema film festival in Albuquerque, NM in April to present a program of “experimental ethnographic films” by myself and others like me. Laurel Petty at Eastern New Mexico University is working with me on that one. The second is a Project Grant to support the realization of an audio/web project I am collaborating on with two pals in Portland called the People’s History of Portland Project which focuses on the impact of police violence on communities. Thanks, RACC! And congratulations to everyone else who was funded by RACC! Lots of great names.
So the external hard drive I brought out here with me died last night, and although it is mostly backed up except for the few items I recently tossed on there – namely, some excellent one-minute videos from the Daily Videos series – it was still a bit of a setback. I spent the good part of today trying to revive it without success. I have hope that I can still get some of the data recovered by computer people back in Portland.
I stayed up late last night and made these low-tech videos using footage I shot on one of my daily walks, pieces of paper suspended from the ceiling, and a fan. I got pretty mesmerized watching the paper float about through the images. I suggest playing them all at the same time. They are silent.
By mid-week I started to hit my stride here at the residency. I decided to focus on three projects: (1) working on the wall covering installation (October: The Wallpaper) for my show in February at PLACE gallery in Portland, (2) reviewing my nine months of daily videos and making them all into a short and snappy video for display on my website, and (3) doing more experiments with projection.
The amazing artist and Eastern Oregon University professor, Susan Murrell helped me make a couple of prints to get a sample of October: The Wallpaper (see below). I plan to use these prints as examples when I make my Kickstarter campaign in the next week. I am going to need some financial help if I am to realize this vision. I am usually into the no-budget art gig, but the idea of seeing all 147,600 or so frames of Eisenstein’s October laid out on walls in a room-sized installation is just too compelling.
I also spent some time organizing and thinking about the one-minute Daily Videos. I am so excited about this collection of minutes. I am going to condense all of them down into something only a few minutes long so I can show it as an ongoing project on my site. This fuzzy video below is today’s video. It shows my October print emerging from the printer. The lens on my flip video camera is limited, but creates some interesting effects.
Experiments with projection. Why have I waited this long to play with projection? These short videos feel really old school. Like I have been hanging out with the guys who madeThe Life and Death of 9413 A Hollywood Extra(1928, Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich).
