Video Social Club #1: Weekenders [Playlist]
Event Details
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Video Social Club presents Weekenders
Video Social Club’s inaugural event Weekenders happened as part of the Plymouth Art Weekender on Friday 25th September 2015. This evening of experimental moving image work and after-show party kicked off the Weekender in style.
THINK: Living for the weekend | Dirty Weekends | Downtime | Weekend Getaways | Happy Hour | Work Hard, Play Hard | Road Trips | Escape | Easy like a Sunday morning | R&R
Programmed by Rachel Dobbs, Steven Paige and Beth Emily Richards.
Programme
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You can now view the programme of selected films here..
Janaye Brown (2014) Cocktail Party
The sustained gaze is important in my videos. By utilizing the long take and a slow pace I seek to distill the nuanced shifts in quotidian life through a measured accumulation of time. My videos are stripped down to engage the viewer in the pro-filmic, that is, everything that exists within the frame. In Cocktail Party, a dense fog gives way to reveal a pair at the edge of a social gathering.
Dana Del Bo – Tomorrow I Will Be Thinking About the Future
Once upon a time there was limited stimulation (distraction) and an abundance of hours.“Tomorrow I Will Be Thinking About the Future” combines footage of the Curiosity Rover landing on Mars with smartphone video of our moon being passed by a cloud. These events are brought together to create a feeling of nostalgia for our former imaginings of the future and the alien. The video addresses the impossibility of being in, or escaping, the ever-elusive now.
Richard Munaba – Love Letter to Vacation
Love Letter to Vacation is very much about escaping the mundane of office culture. The work comprises of appropriated office scene stock footage that can be classified as totally ridiculous. From an office romance affair, to an office worker trying to not drown in a large body of water, to office dance party admits a working day, all in attempt to escape the office mundanity.
Leo Dutov – Selfie
Sam Curtis – Did anyone ever tell you that you’re beautiful when you’re following orders?
Did anyone ever tell you that you’re beautiful when you’re following orders? uses found video footage to look at the way people introduce creativity and individuality into their jobs. The work captures a sequence of fleeting and happenstance moments that draw our attention to people’s desire to express themselves. With a relentless rhythm, the beat of the workplace evolves to become the soundtrack; reminiscent of work songs of the past designed to increase productivity.
Matt Reynolds – Outings
Outings reflects on the state of our digital world in which we can experience the great outdoors from our computer screens. Nostalgic home videos are databent to glitch and warp like fading memories as a computer-generated monologue recounts bygone dirty weekends. No matter how much we detach ourselves from nature with technology, our base instincts remain.
Alice Bradshaw – Rubbish
A montage from the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish. http://museumofcontemporaryrubbish.blogspot.com
Jack Cheetham – Bottle of Wine
Cheetham produced a series of videos focused on his father, David, and in this short video David rehearses Bottle of Wine, a song written by folk singer Tom Paxton. Throughout David’s twenties he was part of an amateur folk music group. He loves to sing but often doesn’t get the opportunity for an audience. One weekend spontaneously after giving his father a customary haircut during a visit home, Cheetham decided to turn his family’s dated camcorder onto his father.
Sherry Vine & Peppermint – Raining Men
Halfway Haus of Vine, the team responsible for such pop parodies as the mega hit parody of “Bad Romance,” “You’re a Homo,” “Living for Scruff,” and “Hung Horse” bring its unique sensibility to The Weather Girls’ iconic 80s dance hit, “It’s Raining Men.” Starring Sherry Vine & Peppermint, directed by Francis Legge and produced by Josh Rosenzweig. “For our version of the song and video we thought it would be an interesting and playful take having two drag performers and a wonderful cast of guys, representing the trans-masculine spectrum.” says Sherry Vine.
Jemma Egan – From Here To Eternity
From Here To Eternity (2014) is a moving image work depicting 2 hot dogs rolling back and forth over and over again. They are nearly touching, but not quite, there’s a tension between them, they are perfect and glistening. The piece is a completely fabricated version of an encountered moment. The hotdogs are actually made of steel and rolled in oil by hand (off camera) – they’re more perfect than they could ever be in real life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbNX6yMtL7w
Eden Mitsenmacher – 4ever
A dialogue between distance and proximity, the fixed and the moving. Exploring the concepts of perception and memory through the illusive surfaces, 4ever highlights the multiplicities contained within a single entity, especially in a world of digital reproduction and dissemination.
Oana Paula Vanier (2014) BRUCE LOVES MICHELLE, PARIS
On 08.06.2014, on the parisian bridge Pont des Arts, one part of the overloaded parapet collapsed. Around two and a half meters caved in under the burden of metal locks. According to the police report, the famous bridge, which connects the Louvre museum and the left Seine shore, was evacuated and closed for reparations. A square meter locks weighs more than 300 kilos, Pont des Arts is supposed to take weight of 93 tons. With help of DO IT YOURSELF internet tutorial I tried to learn how one could crack such a love lock. This demand a lot of time, exercise, skill and sensitivity. I cracked and took with me home as much love locks as I could. I made a necklace out of these love locks and wear it myself.
Theo Shields – 1/300th Tilted Arc
1/300th Tilted Arc captures ants clambering around a replica of a decommissioned public artwork by sculptor Richard Serra. The work playfully hijacks Tilted Arc to observe how an army of ants negotiates a minimalist, conceptual, site-specific intervention. In doing so 1/300th Tilted Arc proposes a quotidian metaphor for the ongoing conflict between art and its place in the public realm.
Barry Anderson – The Road to the Sun
A psychedelic roadtrip through Glacier National Park on Going-To-The-Sun Rd. with a soundtrack by Kansas City-based band Gemini Revolution.
Lucy Dafwyn – Worst Weekend Evah
Juicy Lucy is an occasional singer and sound artist who also loves trawling YouTube for videos to exactly describe her thoughts and feelings at any given moment, using the maxim “if a human has thought it, it’s on YouTube somewhere”. She also takes a perverse pleasure in the bleak, the facile, 1st world problems and the confessional –thus was born a search and selection of videos tagged “worst weekend ever”. She hopes you enjoy it.
Sam Dorgan – Dreams
Chloe Feldman Emison – Crime
Nathan Ceddia – FROGGA
The story follows George the Puppet while he performs a dissection on a frog. But this is no ordinary dissection. This film explores a frog’s personality traits and how they function outside of the amphibian kingdom.
Tim Sullivan – Magic Carpet Ride
George and I take you on a tour of beautiful San Francisco! I met George Kuchar at the San Francisco Art Institute and subsequently was cast as Victor Frankenstein in “The Kiss of Frankenstein” the first installment of his “Frankenstein Trilogy” I went on to act in many more of his films and he helped me out with many of my works as well. To work with George was wonderful, hilarious and life changing. To work with George was also one of my main reasons for moving to San Francisco, this short video brought it together for me: the mentor, the artist, the city. Whenever I miss him I can put this one on and… Laugh.
Robert Ladislas Derr – Hunting the Wren
Based upon the ancient Irish custom of hunting the wren during the winter solstice, I endeavor to find a wren across the terrain in Ireland. There are several Irish legends associated with this clever bird, avoiding hunters, and known for singing in the winter. To have succeeded in catching a wren was an indication of skill and intellect. Today, the hunting of the wren is an existential experience for the Irish of adorning a costume on St. Stephen’s Day and releasing one’s self from the monotony of everyday life.
Jan Pieter Kaptein – 33 sound effects
The “33 soundeffects” video takes its inspiration from Foley, the art of creating sound effects. While Foley artists are using a wide variation of objects, materials and techniques to re-create sounds such as the swishing of clothing or the squeaking of a door, this video shows a rather precarious attempt to create those sounds with no other means than the human voice. The helpless struggle to cope with the script results in a series of thirty-three perfectly awkward sound effects.
Katie Hargrave – Stagehand
Stephanie Hough – Instant Calm
Instant Calm was created using footage from an instructional meditation video sourced in a thrift store. The video is purposefully edited to remove all instruction or speech rendering its original purpose defunct. This video explores notions of self help cultures enacted through leisure activities, and exposes the seemingly innocuous site of leisure as the ultimate performance of human desire for freedom and escape from the constraints of contemporary life.
Barry Sykes – Astronauts: ‘Only Son’
This video commission was indisputably the result of nepotism over skill. I don’t make films, my artwork is normally in wood, paint, found things, text, or me standing up and talking. However, Daniel Carney (Astronauts) and I played together as infants. The next time we would collaborate was this video. I had complete freedom, though ideas and ability led me to recording and editing this entirely in-camera screengrab narrative of an afternoon of building and unbuilding in SketchUp.
