Death and Dying

O'Malley's Head #2

In 1998 I made a sculpture of a decapitated head. I featured it in a photo and video. I thought of the head as a character whose adventures would be documented. The name O’Malley was inspired by Chicago’s Irish heritage (I was living in Chicago then). O’Malley’s Head Part 1 was a photo of the head placed on top of the garbage cans in the alley behind my apartment building. I lived right by an exit ramp from the Kennedy Expressway, one of the last before you reached downtown from O’Hare Airport. Sometimes people would exit there and dump things.

Ben Stone, High Five

High Five usually comes across as absurd and silly, and generally gets a laugh when shown. I appreciate this response and agree it is quite ridiculous on the surface. However few know the true dark meaning of the piece, which was my personal contribution to a ceremony commemorating the twentieth anniversary of my mother's suicide.

Evil Eyes, The

An homage to the death of the soap opera, The Evil Eyes is a 1960's era story of a grandmother faced with her mortality, a mother in mid-life crisis, and a son realizing his sexuality - a dysfunctional family whose unspoken angst manifests in the latest episode of their beloved supernatural soap opera, Before Dawn.

Gossip

Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. It is afternoon in a Brooklyn neighborhood of industrial buildings. Rebecca has a way with words just as words have a way of seeking her out. The crystal ball intensifies this. The A train rumbles over the Manhattan Bridge. Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. Nighttime in a suburban neighborhood of burnt out buildings. Words have a way with Rebecca just as Rebecca has a way of seeking them out. The crystal ball intensifies this.

HalfLifers: The Complete History, 1992 - 2010

HalfLifers is an ongoing collaborative project created by longtime friends and fellow media artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony M. Discenza. Embracing a gestural improvisation-based performance style and championing a rigorously low-fi aesthetic, HalfLifers engages a shifting region of speculative fictions, from play therapy and improvised crisis re-stagings to zombie architectural systems and psychic sandwich surgery.

The Wake, Dana Levy

The Wake was filmed at the Invertebrate Zoology department of the Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh. In this department there are old cabinets full of categorized butterfly specimens, neatly ordered in drawers.  I released into this space 100 live butterflies that flew among the dead specimens.  The result is as if these dead specimens have now come to life.

Agonal Phase, The

In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them.  This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles.  Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning.

-- Jennifer Montgomery

CB
CB

CB is an experimental bio-pic: its heroine, Charlotte Brontë. A collaboration between Doug Ischar and Tom Daws, CB was commissioned by the Laumeier Museum, St. Louis, for their inaugural Nightlight series.

come lontano (How Very Far)

come lontano is a perverse historical romance in which two lives are exposed, inter-mixed, doused with sentiment, and--hopefully--redeemed. The work revolves around a central ‘couple’--Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas. There is a third main character, an ambiguous villain made of steel, glass and rubber. Each member of our central couple has her/his own external distractions which impinge--to varying degrees--on their brief, ecstatic encounter. This encounter was in fact a cinematic collaboration; it’s product the film Medea (1969).

Not Torn (Asunder from the Very Start)

The archive is not a repository of cultural memory, but of dreams, a bank of dream material. Both memory and archive embrace death, but from contrary positions. The archive is a mausoleum that pretends to be a vast garden. Memory is an irradiated zoo in which the various animals are mutating extravagantly and dying slowly.

-- Steve Reinke

Respite

Respite consists of silent black-and-white films shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for Jews fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a 'transit camp.' In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot by a photographer, Rudolph Breslauer. “By exhuming the scattered fragments and traces of the phantom film (intertitle cards, ideas for the scenario, graphic elements), Harun Farocki inscribes the Dutch footage within the genre of the corporate film.

Vanessa

Vanessa is based on the untimely death of Vanessa Jordan. A work about loss and Michelangelo.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

753 McPherson Street

753 McPherson Street employs both original and found footage to represent a very old, passionate, and sometimes lucrative business–a funeral home, in Mansfield, Ohio. The title refers to its street location situated in Everson’s childhood environs.

Cast: DeCarrio Couley.

This title is only availalbe on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

Love Rose

A surreal vision of one man's endeavor to contact the spirit world and come to terms with nightmares of a mysterious death.  A séance is orchestrated according to instructions written in 1920 by revered parapsychologist Hereward Carrington, voiced here by novelist Lynne Tillman.  Roses, seen as light by spirits, are placed in the room but these flowers are plastic;  a requisite round table is surrounded by wooden chairs that remain empty despite stern warnings to never sit alone.

Tran, T. Kim-Trang: The Blindness Series

The Blindness Series consists of eight short videos that investigate blindness and metaphors. Topics of individual tites include cosmetic surgery of the eyelids, vision and sexuality, video surveillance, hysterical blindness, alexia or word-blindness, and physical blindness. The series examines instrumental vision while offering a different kind of visuality, a haptic visuality. Stylistically, Tran's critical approach to video art is essayistic, theoretical, and politically engaged.