A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, 16 minutes)
Winner of the Alice Guy Prize Special Mention at FID Marseille 2020. Notes from the Jury: A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced. The Special Mention for Prix Alice Guy goes to “A POTENTIALITY” by Dana Berman Duff.
A POTENTIALITY is a continuation of my interest in using film to shoot printed material, as in the Catalogue series. I'm especially interested in the equivalence of the film grain to the halftone print dot at the base level of the construction of reproduced image and language.
This piece is built on a graphic project by Susan Silton in which she reprinted five pages of the New York Times from the 1930s. Her project has a disturbing resemblance to present day newspaper reports.
Opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" composed in 1944 by Viktor Ulmann, libretto by Peter Kien.
2-MINUTE TRAILER
"Because the Night" 2009 | "Untitled (Sex)" | "Untitled (Sexy)" |
---|---|---|
"Untitled (Sexy)" | Bowl | "High Strangeness" show 2009 |
"Mom" | "Prell" | "Prell" detail |
"Fish and Hand" | "Fish and Hand" detail |
Installation views of "Because the Night"(2009), curated by Sabina Ott, Chapman College, Orange CA and "High Strangeness" (2009) curated by Donald Krieger at Eagle Rock Arts.
Odor di Femina Bottles
The "Odor di Femina" sculptures ponder the mysteries of inner space. Inspired by a Twilight Zone episode seen at age seven and mis-remembered for twenty-five years (where a woman's head ends up in a jar) the original "Odor di Femina" bowls from 1989 were assembled with cast-off stuff from street sellers and junk shops, and with common liquids, like corn oil and transmission fluid. They are not constructed according to any themes; instead, the viewer may discern convergences and emerging narratives that are mostly random (indeed the artist's subconscious desire may participate with the viewer's). They were interpreted through theories of the body, specifically Julia Kristeva's writings about abjection. For me, these interiors include both the body and mind.
I constructed a new series of bowls in 2009 at the invitation of artist and curator Sabina Ott.