Kalin's short video works function both as visual poems and as alternative music videos. With their astute conjunctions of image, music and text, these tapes respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s, more than a decade into the AIDS crisis.
This highly stylized and deftly edited provocation features a cast of performers, diverse in national origin, who recite a litany of statements meant to challenge viewers' secure notions of national identity. Kalin asserts that bodies are very real battlegrounds, territories that are contested and controlled by the same political forces that
Kalin's short video works, which use literary quotations as starting points, function both as visual poems and alternative music videos that respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s. In Nomads, a brief text by Jane Bowles is the point of departure for a vivid music video that presents an elliptical view of the realities of contemporary urban life.
Kalin's short video works function both as visual poems and as alternative music videos. With astute conjunctions of image, music and text, these works respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s. In Darling Child, Kalin uses spare visuals of an interior space and minimalist music to create an evocative interpretation of a text by Truman Capote.
With wit and savvy, Kalin combines text, graphics and flowers with musical and political quotation to comment on the disjuncture between a conservative, medicalized discourse that describes homosexuality as both "unnatural" and "dangerous," and the possibilities of liberation involved in...
Information Gladly Given but Safety Requires Unnecessary Conversation
Tom Kalin
1995, 1:03 min, color, sound
In I hung back, held fire, danced and lied Kalin confronts loss, intimacy and estrangement. This visually arresting piece is constructed of Super-8 fragments that document familiar and foreign spaces, lovers and strangers. Rapidly intercut with these images are brief glimpses of names of...
Description
Third Known Nest brings together Kalin's witty and poignant "video diary" pieces with new interstitial material that thematically links the works with cogent literary quotes. Merging elements of music video, text, and intimate Super 8 "home movies," Kalin has created a personal and cultural chronicle of the 1990s. Tracing a trajectory that moves from stylized AIDS activist spots to alternative music videos and poems of love and loss, Kalin' video journal culminates in a performative self-portrait.
