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
Group Show Sculptures
Dollhouse
1994, sawdust/Elmer's glue. Made for the "Playing House" show at Nathalie Karg Gallery with Polly Apfelbaum, Dana Duff, Sharon Garbe, Julia Kidd, Marilyn Minter, Holly Morse, Susan Silas, Sue Williams. Each of the artists was given a blank dollhouse to work with. Having little interest in the domestic, I sawed the dollhouse into sawdust and reconstituted it as a full-sized pig—of exactly the same cubic volume.
Root-headed Guys (from Breugel)
1998, bronze 4" x 3" For show "Against Nature" Art Center Pasadena
In 1559 the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the panel Netherlandish Proverbs including on it literal illustrations of more than a hundred Dutch language proverbs.
Many of these proverbs focus on the absurdity of much of our human behavior and Bruegel's renditions reinforce this interpretation portraying a world literally turned upside down. At the same time some of the more serious proverbs illustrate the dangers of folly, which leads to sin.
Sick
1988, Lamp parts, Vick's Vaporub, flame
Milford Gallery. Lending a sickroom odor to the gallery in a group show on the theme of AIDS.
Vase
1989, Elizabeth MacDonald Gallery, New York
Resin, roses, glycerin, alabaster
Clown head with inverted vase-shaped cavity, filled with glycerin and a bouquet of roses.
Wood Pile
1997, 14" x 12" x 27" - wood, latex dental dam, pebbles. In "Splice,” Side Street Projects, Los Angeles
Invited to use a dental dam as part of an artwork.
Train Wreck
1997, Cardboard and card table with paint. In the "The Box," curated by Sabina Ott at Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington D.C.
Envy
1995 in "A Vital Matrix" at Domestic Setting Gallery, mixed media
Stoppages
1994, mixed media in "Flow"curated by Sabina Ott at Cerritos College
Roshomon
1987, 40" x 30", smoke on movie screen with constructed wood frame. For "Notations on the Virtual" Loughelton Gallery, NYC
