1

Shelly Silver

2001, 3:12 min, color, sound

An exploration in mood and tone, 1 is a montage of image, music, and language. Against a split-screen study of New York beat cops, Silver presents a sentence, drawn out in single words over the course of the piece. Through subtle word repetition, she alters what would appear to be a unified sentence; this, in addition to the doubled image, calls the work's title into question.

5 Minute Break

Kristin Lucas

2001, 4:35 min, color, sound

While artist-in-residence in the north tower of the World Trade Center, Lucas was given a tour of the center's sub-basement. 5 Minute Break is the eerie artifact of that tour. An animated woman roams the WTC sub-basement like a benign Lara Croft, negotiating an underground maze of empty stairwells, faded graffiti, hulking machinery, and discarded trash. Lucas' vision of a haunted netherworld of dead-ends and detritus beneath the trade center captures a lost realm.

Flo Rounds A Corner

Ken Jacobs

1999, 6 min, color, silent

WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.

Now

Lynda Benglis 

1973, 12 min, color, sound

Now takes on video's claims to immediacy and authenticity, as Benglis juxtaposes live performance with her own prerecorded image. The soundtrack features phrases such as "now!" and "start recording," commands that usually ground us in the present, but here serve to deepen the confusion between live signals and mediation. Repeated takes and acidic color processing heighten this challenge to video's power of "liveness."

orange factory

Seoungho Cho

2002, 11:38 min, color, sound

orange factory travels the back-roads of the Korean countryside at twilight. A haunted voice, reading from Ryu Murakami's Almost Transparent Blue, recalls experiences of pain and abandonment. An unsettling music track underscores the themes of alienation and loss. Here Cho uses light to reflect on personal history and identity, traversing the terror and beauty of memory.

Paradise Crushed

Leslie Thornton

2003, 12:10 min, color, sound

Paradise Crushed could be the black hole at the center of the film and video constellation that is Thornton's Peggy and Fred cycle. Scraps of sound and image, barely recognizable from previous episodes, collide and recombine as the story of the two children "raised by television" buckles under the pressure of digital technologies, electronic surveillance and millennial apocalyptic fervor.

phantom limb

Phyllis Baldino 

2002, 7:08 min, color, sound

Baldino writes: "A friend of mine rented a home in rural Connecticut for the weekends. Eugene O'Neill once lived there, but in the original part of the house. The additions were added later. It has been on the market for a long time but still does not sell. There is something about the house... the way it was, the way it is now... I could not get it out of my head. After researching O'Neill's life it all came together in this piece."

Quin Quag

Michael Smith and Joshua White

2002, 8 min, color, sound

Ostensibly one segment of a television magazine show called "Millennium Visions," Quin Quag is in fact a carefully crafted simulation. Smith plays the entrepreneur "Mike Smith," who, while planning an arts and wellness conference center in the Catskill Mountains, uncovers a fifty-year old artists' colony that was formerly on the property.

Rainer Variations

Charles Atlas 

2002, 41:30 min, b&w and color, sound

Employing archival film clips and new video, Atlas' self-described "video montage" is a portrayal of filmmaker/choreographer Yvonne Rainer. While an extended interview with Rainer runs throughout the piece, four "performers" enact and re-enact the interview. Atlas undermines genre conventions, shuffling and superimposing image and voice tracks to yield a video palimpsest of theatricality and ambiguity.

Water Light/Water Needle (Lake Mah Wah, NJ)

Carolee Schneemann

1966, 11:13 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video

Schneemann's classic 1966 aerial "Kinetic Theatre" work was first staged at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, with eight performers moving to a score of randomized encounter on layers of rigged ropes and pulleys. One of two video documents of this early and influential performance, this version is...