Video Art Stills
Welcome to my Video Art Stills page. As the page title says, this is where you can find stills from my video art. Each photo still has its own title as a stand-alone art photograph that happens to be from a video piece.
From "The Paranoid Duality with a Side of Not So Dramatic"
Like Me My Love Like Me
This is one of my favorites. I love the lighting, the way one image is a little more hazy, yet they are identical. Of course, this is me kissing a mirror (no vanity intended) to symbolize the first kiss between two soul mates. In this case, the soul mates are two women.
I See You See Me Like You
This still is about a second before the kiss. It's that recognition, that "there you are" between two people who are meant to be together.
Garbage In Garbage Out
In this still, the leader has chastized the followers and now leans into the camera to take a piece of wadded paper out of his/her mouth. Once the paper is opened, it reads "Who Am I?" Who are these people making the decisions and telling all of us what is right or wrong? Who are they not in what they say or their carefully formed image, but who are they in their core of being?
*If you're wondering what the butterfly over my eyes symbolizes, at least to me, please refer to my "Artist Statement" on My Blog page of this site. Of course, every image is up for every individual's interpretation. All I'm saying is this is what I think it means, and, like in the mirror kiss, that interpretation might have changed from when I first shot it to now, so it it is very flexible.
Self-Portrait
This was a spontaneous moment I filmed because the kiss in the mirror didn't work the way I'd planned. I tried many angles in the mirror kiss, trying to get an image of myself without makeup & my hair back to create a male-ish image while I wore a pink, very feminine bra. I wanted the illusion of dual gender in one body while looking in the mirror for the kiss, like the masculine and feminine parts of my personality kissing, but I just couldn't get the angle and image I wanted, so I settled for what you see, my kissing my mirror image. Actually, the end result is one of my absolute favorites in the finished product, but I wanted that dual gender image, so I just looked at the camera, but I framed it wrong, you can't really tell I'm in a bra, and that's what you see here. Again, once I saw it, I liked it. Makes a nice Facebook profile picture.
Untitled
When my family first moved to Kansas from Dallas, Texas when I was 16, it was culture shock for me. I moved from big concrete city to rural farmland. As we drove to the town we'd moved to, we passed this house. Back then, the man who'd created the militia merry-go-round in the front yard still lived there. I never met him, but he was known in the area as an extreme right-wing survivalist, militia type. He's gone, but the house and merry-go-round are still there. It terrified me to get the footage of it all, even from the street, because that mentality is a reality in that area and I was afraid I'd be shot, but that mentality was the embodiment of the "paranoia" in the title. If I hadn't chanced getting the footage, I would have never forgiven myself as an artist.
From "Ice Box"
This still is from my project, "Ice Box." In this piece, I explore gender conformity and compare it to the winter weather we currently have. The blizzard that came in February 2011 had many of us feeling trapped. We are vulnerable to Mother Nature's whims as to how long this snow, ice, and bitter temperatures will last. We can keep warm indoors (as long as don't lose electricity) but there's still a feeling of being limited, of not being free, as long as we're trapped. To me, that's like gender conformity. One can exist, but can't truly live a life of being limited, not free, not at peace, when he or she is forced into a gender identity. Just as we're trapped indoors because of the cold, we can be trapped in our own skin by forced perceptions of what we're supposed to be. So I used pink acrylic paint to write "GIRL" in the snow on my porch. As the days passed, I continued to film the letters. As the snow and freezing temperatures continued, I shot video of the letters until they melted.
This still is titled "Hope" because seeing the sun and lots of blue in the sky gave me hope, and represented a freer life for all of us who aren't of the so-called norm. There is hope, every time any of us express ourselves in a way that hurts no one, but makes us happy. Hopehopehope.