Involuntary Narratives
Selected by Laura Purdy, 58 minutes

Whether it is the artist's compulsion or the audience's, in their varying ways, each piece has an element that pushes it without choice toward a narrative.

PROGRAM:

Day---Night by Humberto Duque,
2 :08

Dress Form by Laura Martin,
2:00
On a windy day at the beach a woman dressed in only a slip is desperately trying to put on a billowy gown that is also a kite. I like to think of it as the impulse toward the heroine. In Dress Form a woman is in a tug of war with Mother Nature. Is she undeserving of this symbol of ideal femininity? Or maybe it's a symbol of the turmoil inside of her?

Eels by Patty Chang,
3:00, 2001
Patty Chang makes us squeal, along with her, as five live eels are put down her white schoolgirl oxford. The act that is focused on in this video is not the experience of watching her squirm once all the eels are inside her shirt; but the back and forth decision of her wanting and then not wanting the snakelike fishes down her shirt.

Rainbow by Gabriel Jennings,
2:00, 2001
The filmmaker writes that she could not resist shooting 2 minutes of video upon walking into the Hollywood Park RaceTrack. This compulsory act leads us somewhere over the rainbow.

Reportage by Raul Cordero,
6:00
An encounter between a man and a woman leaves us, with our every move in processing the video, inventing the meaning and the context to the scene witnessed from an apartment window in Cuba.

Fishtank by Richard Billingham,
47:00, 1998
Billingham's FISHTANK is a story we don't want to hear. Shot in extreme close-up it is literally a family under the microscopic gaze. Among the dark pathos of the artist's family, the tender caress of the camera on a father's cheek and uncomplicated moments of companionship force one toward the possibility of considering the many stories that reside within these walls and our own.