art
ESCAPE at Gallery HOMELAND
A slate of experimental shorts from Canada for free tonight? Just press <ESC>.
Tonight curator J.J. Kegan McFadden brings ESCAPE, a free program of experimental shorts from Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg, Canada to Portland’s Gallery HOMELAND (in Ford Building, corner of SE 10th and Division) at 8 PM. The program includes work by Lori Weidenhammer + Donna Lewis, Sylvia Matas, Ho Tam, Hope Peterson, Tim Raffey, Leslie Supnet, Dominique Rey, Lisa Graves + Deborah Van Slet, Victoria Prince, Doug Melnyk, Anne Borden + Gail Mentlik, Jeremy Drummond, Divya Mehra, Collin Zipp, and Ken Gregory.
Curator’s statement:
POSTED: July 23rd, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: experimental shorts, film, gallery homeland, screening, video | No Comments »There has always been more than one way to escape. The term itself carries with it several connotations: to flee, to transcend, to avoid. In our ever-evolving digital realm, to escape means something different altogether. When online, we escape through various quasi-anonymous discourses (blogs, games, chat rooms). The button located at the top left of the computer keyboard provides the user a means to get out of certain messy situations; to begin anew. Here, I am interested in an escape narrative, one informed by the medium, by the history of story telling, and the Hero’s Journey. This escape attempt is for us all.
Various metaphors for escape are alluded to in the fifteen videos collected here: disguise, travel, dance, sex, and meditation each become important elements on this ESCAPE route. Thus, the sequential ordering of the videos in ESCAPE is important. I have attempted not only to collect these titles within a specific trope, but also to shape them in order to tell a story. The plot, one might recognize, when discussing such a topic, is informed by archetypal stories.
