Featured Sidewalk Video Artists November 2 - 29, 2023
“Waiting for you to come to” by Fever DreamScapes
“Fever DreamScapes is a collaborative series experimenting with painting and video to create an uncanny effect. Through the integration of old and new media, video artist Keaton Fox and painter Renee Silva come together to generate surreal landscapes of static and moving images that visualize the often paradoxical ecologies of the present. Silva’s abstract environments of rooms, foliage, and symbols are animated into Fox’s video collages of limbs, animals, and loss. Contemplative oil paintings reveal new narratives as they dissolve into pixels of chaos and connection. These unusual simulations meld contemporary and traditional mediums together to introduce a unique visual language that continually alludes to a universal but undefined feeling of recurring dissonance. Forever invested in making the invisible visible, Fox and Silva are particularly stimulated by the visceral tensions that accompany politics surrounding subjects that can be difficult to visualize; with climate change, disability, and queerness being themes that routinely guide their joint practice.”
“Insomnia” by Angelica Verdan
“Insomnia is a visualization of the mind's noise over time while trying to sleep. Born out of frustration, each frame is an abstract pixel image created during each restless night, totaling 120 individual images. Insomnia is looped and projected in physical liminal spaces to parallel the seemingly endless transition between being awake and being asleep. I'm a Filipino American video artist deconstructing the idea of digital presence and how it manifests and functions differently than physical identity. Inspired by video games and online communities, I use video, projection, and other digital media as methods to study how people interact and express themselves in all spaces.”
“Swan Song” by Elizabeth Ulanova
“Swan Song is a loose abstraction of climate change through the lens of 1941's Galina Ulanova's swan song, her dance of The Last Swan in Swan Lake. A conceptual art video that copulates between the literal and figurative layers of a swan song - the last performance of a masterpiece. Would this era of environmental impermanence produce our final farewell to the seven seas?”
“When I___” by Janella Mele
“This is a video and part Virtual Reality experience that has been showcased internationally and debuted at the Museum School of Fine Arts at Tufts graduating class group show in 2018. It’s an artwork that I created using a combination of software including Unity, Adobe Premiere and Maya. This video takes the viewer on a transcendental journey into my healing experience during a sexual trauma survivors group.”
“Moonlit Oil Spill” by Renee Silva
'“Renee Silva (Fever DreamScapes collaborator) is an artist and art faculty at Phillips Academy Andover as well as a Massart and SMFA Tufts alum. They are interested in subverting the medium and history of paint to deconstruct systems. Keaton Fox is a Florida-based video artist interested in understanding our relationship to advancing technology and its impacts on perception. Eight years ago they met on Craigslist in Boston and have since been collaborating to bring their mediums to new grounds and bring visibility to underrepresented and hard to visualize issues such as queerness, disability, and climate change.”
“CONDUIT” by Lynn Kim
“CONDUIT poses the possibility of imagining the heavy footfalls of a run, the rhythmic inhale/exhale patterns of breath, and the emptying of the mind while running as mirror elements of a Korean shamanic ritual. With the runner operating as the shaman, the moments of the run wherein they are airborne and wherein they touch the ground are moments of contact with heaven and earth. A simple run outside then becomes the means to explore, for a fleeting moment in time, alternative states of being. Created using a range of drawing, digital, and stop-motion animation techniques, the filmmaking process becomes a parallel ritual that likewise requires rhythm, repetition and bodily presence.”