TRANSMISSIONS
A Fall Chill
Getting ready to leave for work in the morning, a couple discusses cycles of periodicity—one voice plays inside the gallery bathroom, the other inside the main gallery.
1991
sound, speakers, bathroom materials
After Time Being
An ode to my father, made after he died. The title is inspired by my teacher Gunvor Nelson’s film Time Being, made while her mother lay in bed in a nursing home.
2008
digital video
(excerpt)
Arabesques: Part I and II
A series of videos shot while in Turkey, a couple travel on a ferry boat, a cemetery is explored, the sun moves.
1995 -1998
video
Hello?你好!
in collaboration with Li Xiaofei
Li Xiaofei and I were paired as part of a San Francisco/ Shanghai Sister City Exchange. It seemed important to go to Shanghai to meet him. We met but did not speak a word of the other’s language. We used Google translate to communicate, and had such a good time that we continued our exchange via email for thirty days. During that time Google withdrew from China, adding more drama to our conversation. Our exchange became a two-screen video projection.
The double projection with one series of responses in English and the other in Chinese has undergone an act of translation through the translation software—only the translation is shown. The resulting conversation is one sided for most people unless they read both English and Mandarin. The gaps, delays, misinterpretations in the translation process also hold an unexpected poetry of daily exchange.
2010
digital video
I listen, you nourish me
In collaboration with Liliana Diaz Garcia and Patricia Ruiz
Made during a residency at Chiquita Room in Barcelona. The performance is in the form of the Catalan ensalada, a kind of musical round. In this multi-lingual performance we spoke in English, Catalan, Spanish and Catalan Sign Language. The score—extracted from language on five different bread wrappings—is first performed by the three of us, then the audience participates for further rounds.
2022
scores
July 25th: Ode to Elizabeth Bradix and Rosilee Brooks
The point of departure is a newspaper article about how two women Elizabeth Bradix and Rosalee Brooks had been bilked of their life savings.
I contacted the women in the article and asked if they would mind me making an homage. They were deeply religious, very dear women and very open.
The gallery walls are covered in cropped scans from the newspaper article. There are multiple small tableaux, each one with a sound element, an example is a series of hand painted paper fans of girls praying suspended over a circle of fresh sod, a portable tape machine plays Glenn Spearman’s ode written for the women. Glenn’s daughter builds a pile of rocks as he plays the saxophone.
1988
photocopy texts, paper fans, portable sound players, sod, water pumps, water hoses, portable electric fan
Love, Lynn
A poem to my Mother and Grandmother.
1982
16mm film
Miniatures in Lydian Mode
An attempt to speak across languages during an encounter visiting Kayaköy, a town in Turkey forcibly abandoned by its Greek citizens during WWI.
1994
video
Off the Tracks
Shot on a train in France the piece explores different forms of time, from the linear time of train travel, to the biological unfolding of physical and cognitive development of the child through the acquisition of language and concepts of counting; the movement from the realm of the mother to the realm of the father.
As the TGV screams through the French countryside the landscape becomes a blur. My son, looking at the small camera screen, asks if we are going “off the tracks”?
I worked with the pixel shapes of image break-up to articulate the planes of the horizon line, redefining the shifting space of landscape and the history of framing landscape, here through the window of the train.
This landscape image then collapses and expands further as I improvise with it while digitizing. For each theme/time pressure investigation, I improvised three times with the same material and put each improvisation back to back. Thus even the linear and chronological time is expanded and collapsed through fast-forwarding and rewinding. Each three-part improvisation is then looped for the triptych; each screen varies in length so that the relationship between the screens is always shifting.
2001
digital video triptych
Oracular Transmissions
in collaboration with Etel Adnan
The book weaves together three collaborative projects Etel and I made through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017).
2020
published by X Artists’ Books
(excerpt)
Paris and Athens
Looking out a hotel window in Paris, and an apartment in Athens, a couple discuss ideas as they dress.
1994
video
Photons in Paris: image encoding. 1, 2, 3 and 4
This series emerged from a daily practice in which I shot the same Parisian interior, focusing on moments of light and daily life inside my apartment.
These grew out of observations of the shifting light in my apartment at the same time as I was exposing 16mm film to the light of the apartment as a way to record the shifting light in different rooms.
Fast forwarding and rewinding the images as I imported the video into the computer, editing all happened live, the hard drive would crash determining edits.
1998 -2000
digital video
(image encoding .1)
Ping Pong
Sponsored by the US Department of State’s Arts Envoy Program, I curated this exhibition for the residence of the American Ambassador to Serbia, Michael Kirby. The title of the exhibition, Ping Pong, comes from a story told to me by my niece Natalija Pavlovic, who was born in Belgrade and immigrated to the US as a child. Before she was born Tito’s government requisitioned the family’s house and an apartment building was built at the site.
In exchange, the family was given an apartment in the building. When the family moved into the building they brought the ping pong table from their former garden, installed the table on the roof, and met their new neighbors.
The exhibition features art from American, Serbian-American, Serbian artists and other artists from around the world whose work and practice engage questions of exchange, translation, reconciliation, and memory.
Participating artists: Simone Fattal, Jeanne Finley, Alexandra Grant, Doug Hall, Taraneh Hemami, Lynn Marie Kirby, Žolt Kovač, Leora Lutz, Alexis Joseph, Branislav Nikolić, Vessna Perunovich, Ana Prvački, Ann Schnacke, Selman Trtovac, Susan Working, Al Young
2013
video, painting, sculpture, photograph, installation, sound work, work on stone, work in paper, textiles
Prelude
A film about light and aggression, heat and religion; she ascends from the piano.
1982
16mm film
Room Tone
A textual exploration of the expanded concept of Room Tone, the sound that is the in-between sound in a dialogue scene or the sound of an environment. How might this sound be thought of as a material, for example: ‘to dub’ in Japanese means to blow and exchange—a different voice is blown into a body.
The text is read along with a video that plays only room tone recordings I had made at various locations. Each take begins with the sound recordist saying, silence, Room Tone.
2016
performance, book
Regional Cooking
Shot in a cotton field in Mississippi, attuning to the history of such a site. “The barbecue is hot enough if you have to pull your hand away before you have finished spelling Mississippi."
1985
16mm film
(excerpt)
Sharon and the Birds on the Way to the Wedding
This is a film about the language and perception of love and romance. The film blurs the line between fact and fiction, personal and cultural experience. "She found that the truth didn't sound real. She did research. She went through the magazines. She found that there existed a magazine kind of love that had a vocabulary of about twelve words. She found that if she rearranged these twelve words around different names and places that she could make a story."
1987
16mm film
Side by Side: Karate Class Exposure Three Variations
Harrell Fletcher and I worked closely while he was a graduate student at CCA in the early 90’s. We shared an interest in the daily. Since Harrell graduated our lives continued to intersect. I took a class of mine to visit Harrell while he was in residence at the Headlands. At the end of the visit he gave away objects from his past. Harrell selected a pair of fringed dress up pants from his childhood that he thought would be perfect for James. James has worn them in a video of mine. At the time of the visit I was working on a web project using boats. In Harrell’s space were the most beautiful boats made by a teacher of his. I linked Harrell’s teacher’s boats to my site.
Harrell and I went out for drinks every night when we were working in adjoining galleries at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
We talked about one day doing something together. Both of us are so busy that it worked out to multi-task; making a project together while doing something else.
Side by Side is the exhibition we made together/ but separately working at my son James’s karate school. The location fit with both Harrell’s interest in working with people in everyday situations and my ongoing practice of working with my family.
At the end of the screening of Harold’s work and my work, James and his teacher Sensai Shanus performed. James did a flying leap over five fellow students lying on the stage to break a wooden board with his foot that his Sensai held in his hands.
2005
digital video
(excerpt)
Sincerely
A film about choice. It is every woman's choice, regardless of economics, whether or not to have children. This is a film about abortion, specifically state funding of abortion.
With the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, the government cut out funding of abortion except when the life of the mother is endangered. I wrote to all 100 Senators protesting this bill. I received this reply: Try, really try not to get knocked up in the future — A Senator without a lot of sympathy. This response became a refrain that runs through the film in large pink letters.
1980
16mm film
SMRN a portrait
in collaboration with Loreto Remsing
Made a scent portrait of the Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN) Group. A network of artists and scholars I belong to who are interested in media arts and non-western philosophical traditions.
I wrote to members of the group and asked them to describe a place that was important to their practice. From their responses, I organized structures from which I could make a scent. For example: when someone noted they were interested in radial patterning, I thought of citrus, so could add a note of citrus to the scent, or new green leaves, a green note in scent is common, and so on, until I had created a note for each member of the network.
2021
scent
Standardized Screen Tests
I was curious about the pressure young boys experience about masculinity as they move into puberty. I found an interview conducted by François Truffaud of the young actor Jean Pierre Léaud during screen tests for 400 Blows. I used these questions as my point of departure, thinking of these as screen tests after Andy Warhol’s series as well.
I worked with boys on my son’s baseball team and at his middle school. They were all around the age of eleven. We shot a roll of 16mm film for each boy, standard video, and with their cell phones. The project has several different iterations, a two-boy sequence, an installation, and a sequence with fifteen boys.
2008
16mm to digital video
Transmissions
in collaboration with Etel Adnan
A video and live reading created with longtime collaborator, poet and painter, Etel Adnan. Inspired by recent time spent together in Paris, the piece incorporates collaborative drawings and open-ended conversation about Mount Tamalpais (the site of many of Etel's paintings), animals, ritual, democracy, and the oracular.
2017
broadsheet, video, and reading
Umbra-Inversions/information
The light of a 16mm projector is cast through a doorway into a walkway of the museum, as viewers walk by they cast shadows. This shadow image is captured by a camera, transmitted to a computer, inverted and printed. Viewers are invited to take away their shadows. Made shortly after September 11, 2001.
2001
iMac, 16mm projector, live video transmission, printer