MOVING IMAGES: PAUSE... RESTART

There are times when a significant event interrupts our lives, making us feel like we have been put on hold by forces beyond our control, shaking our perceptions of day-to-day reality. Such a destabilizing interruption is foremost in our collective consciousness at this moment, having all experienced this on a grand scale when the world came grinding to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, suspending us in uncertainty.

As disruptive and distressing as such episodes can be, they can guide us forward with new perspectives and changed priorities. Reflecting on what is most important to us, we may contemplate new ways of being and reconsider, or even re-invent, essential aspects of our existence—be it our jobs, our relationships, our living environment, our well-being and even our greater purpose in the world.

Moving Images: pause…. restart features moving image artworks by 23 artists that address the idea of restarting with renewed purpose, offering their reflections on creating a better world, no matter what changes, big or small, they envision to get there.

About the Juror:
Clark Buckner is a curator and cultural critic, who works as Director of the San Francisco art gallery and production company, Telematic Media Arts, where he exhibits and supports time-based arts with particular attention to screen culture and art's intersection with contemporary information and telecommunications technologies.

For many years, Buckner taught critical theory and cultural criticism in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. His publications on art, philosophy, and film/video have appeared in both academic and popular journals. He previously served as Director/Curator of the project space, MISSION 17, and he composes sound scores for the dance company Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works. He has a PhD in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University.

Juror’s Statement:
The title of this exhibition, Moving Images: pause… restart, immediately evokes our  recent collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of the virus,  across the country and the world, brought daily life abruptly to a halt. The demand  to shelter in place made typical social interactions impossible. Shops and offices  closed. Manufacturing stalled and supply-chains were interrupted. Travel plans  were cancelled; kids stayed home from school; and social gatherings moved into  the zoom-rooms of cyberspace.  

Indeed, as an on-line exhibition of short video works, the very form of this show is  itself symptomatic of the pandemic’s interruption of our lives. When it was con ceived in the Spring of 2021, the Cabrillo Gallery’s administrators clearly were  uncertain whether, by the following Fall, they would be able to safely re-open  their doors and invite audiences again to attend a show in their exhibition space.  Exhibiting artwork on-line provides a way to circumvent this obstacle, reaching out  to audiences at home, and keeping culture alive despite the persistent restrictions  of social distancing. 

At the same time, the show’s title evokes the optimism of the Spring and the new found freedoms that we have, indeed, come to enjoy since then. Vaccines have been  developed. They have proven safe and been widely distributed. Rates of infection  and death are down in much of the country. Shops and restaurants are opening  again. People are gathering for performances, sporting events, and films, returning  to their schools and churches, even traveling across the country to visit with friends  and family.  

Yet, re-covering from the pandemic has proven more complicated than anticipated.  While the majority of Americans have heeded the advice of medical experts, public  health and safety has been horribly politicized in the United States and elsewhere.  Right-wing leaders have actively discouraged people from wearing masks and get 

ting vaccinated. Disinformation has been widely propagated on social media and  television. At the same time, vaccines, masks, and other medical supplies have not  been equally distributed around the world; so that many countries still lack the  necessary resources to combat the pandemic. At home and abroad the virus con tinues to spread and mutate. And, rather than emerging from our quarantine as we  had hoped, we find ourselves in a liminal state. We are better guarded against the  virus, but it is very much still with us. 

In this same vein, the videos featured in this exhibition present the dynamics of  movement, interruption, and renewal as less of a series of discrete moments in a  narrative sequence, than a play of forces that off-set one another in complex and,  sometimes, contradictory ways. And they find this play of forces at work, in far  reaching facets of experience: including, but not limited to, the play of light and  color, the passage of time, the political limbo of undocumented immigrants, the  fluid underdetermination of gender and identity, the power of symbols, the fragility  in our constitutions, and the contradictions in our institutions. Collectively, the  result is a portrait of precarity and resilience, rich with patience, appreciation,  hope, and joy. 

Many videos in the show directly address the experience of the pandemic. Jay  Goldberg’s When the Buildings Cheered was shot on nightly walks through New York  City over five weeks in the Summer of 2020, when the city was the epicenter of the  COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The film first captures the quiet empti ness of the streets. As the camera pans across the surface of buildings, the loudest  sound is the chirping of birds. Suddenly, an electric guitar erupts in a rendition of  the Star-Spangled Banner. Someone else plays Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York,  loudly on their stereo. Crowds call out from the open windows of their apartment  buildings, cheering, clapping, banging on cans. The film documents the nightly ritual  that developed in New York and elsewhere to celebrate and give thanks to front 

line workers on their way home after work. As another critic noted, at the same  time, the cheering crowds expressed supportive solidarity with their neighbors,  celebrating their common resilience. Indeed, their persistence. 

In his surreal, animated film, L’Hesitance, John Jota Leaños depicts the pandemic’s  interruption of everyday life as an existential crisis, riddled with anxiety and ennui.  Through his lens, the boundaries of the self were called into question as life effec tively came to a halt and we withdrew from one another into the digital abstrac tions of our computer screens.  

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira’s Woman on Fire, from Bedroom Soliloquies, is framed in  the style of a webcam video. A combination of still and moving images captures the  parameters of the artist’s room, the space in which she has been quarantined; while  a poem on the soundtrack connects this confinement to the too-often oppressive  restrictions on women’s lives. And the artist rebels against them. 

In her short performance video, Hugs, Pillow Talk, Diane Dwyer lies on her side with  skinned knees, embracing a pillow. Her injuries make clear that she is in pain; and  she clings to the pillow with an anxious intensity. It is an image of self-soothing: a  comfort required by the many stresses of the pandemic. And it is vaguely erotic, an  honest, intimate glimpse into the pain of isolation and the longing for human touch. 

In The Noisiest Year of Silence, Peg Shaw explores the pandemic’s paradoxical com bination of stillness and unrest. A boat floats over still waters, reflecting the light  and clouds in the sky. Hands reach out, unable to connect with one another. On  the soundtrack, we hear crowds cheering front line workers and protesting racial  injustice. The cacophonous noise starkly contrasts with the images of suspended  isolation. Yet, this silence is itself symptomatic of the tumult in the world, requiring  us to hold up in our homes; and the two—noise and silence—are not so much con tradictory, but rather uncanny complements. 

And Lesley Louden’s Reflection tells the story of visiting family after long months  of sheltering in place with a newfound awareness about the importance of those  places and relationships. A heightened attention of details, finding symbolic mean-

ing in things, appreciating the unique joys afforded by parents. The challenges of  the pandemic provide this indirect gift: the frailties they reveal raise questions of  how best to live in light of our limited time. They provoke reflection. 

Other videos in the exhibition extrapolate still further from the pandemic’s dis ruption of everyday life. In his stop-motion animated film, Watch Your Step, Collin  Pollard plays with the pause of a crosswalk, as if waiting for the light to change. The  street corner’s geometric shapes are highlighted and brought to life, while cartoon ish video-game music plays on the soundtrack. Indeed, the flashing colored shapes  evoke the whistles and chimes of a ricocheting pinball machine, until they cut free  of the still image altogether and overtake the video. 

Michelle Herman’s Untitled (Haunted Fish Tank) is a short experimental video, fea turing a cell phone submerged in a fish tank, playing clips from reality TV and melo dramatic soap operas. The image reads like an analog for our fishbowl zoom rooms,  both restricted and exposed; while the cellphone speaks to the experience of social  life now mediated by screens. At stake, it seems, is the fate of meaningful relation ships in the digital age. A reality TV contestant complains about the phoniness of  people on social media. A woman’s desire is equated with her Instagram feed. Is  there authenticity via webcam? 

Eric Millikin’s CHARYBDIS-3 is a video vortex produced with artificial intelligence  trained on images of species endangered by climate change. The image zooms  ever deeper into an otherworldly landscape, comprised of the sinewy organisms.  Sympathetic eyes stare out from the skin of the creature’s body, which is also the  dense foliage of a forest. We have entered a liminal zone in which what has been  lost has merged with the still yet to come, producing a monstrous alien that some how we must learn to live with, even appreciate in its beauty. 

Margaret McCarthy’s every day is a brand new day, every night it’s the same old shit depicts the dynamics of motion, interruption, and renewal as a psychological ten dency, which follows the rhythm of the day, beginning with an overly-enthusiastic  optimism in the morning and ending with melancholic despondence at night. The  dynamic is pathological in its excesses: an irrational distortion of life’s inevitable 

ups and downs. Yet, in this same way, it rings true to the times—when it is hard to  get the scope of events into proper perspective, and we find ourselves too often  oscillating between manic self-affirmation and nihilistic doom-scrolling. 

Benjamin Benet’s San Quentin State Prison is an animated flip-book produced with  one hundred and seventy-seven watercolor paintings of San Quentin State Prison,  painted from the same spot, one a day, sequentially for one hundred and seventy seven days. It is a durational performance, a devotional practice in the form of an  artwork. The film marks the passage of time through the catalog of paintings, and  what they capture as changes in the weather, shifting light and color in the sky,  birds on the water. It is a study in captivity, of stasis and change, and a quiet reflec tion on the law, guilt, and restoration. 

In Hoping Tomorrow Will Already Be Different From Today, Ivette Spradlin and Lenore  Thomas similarly mark the passage of time through the flickering of light and  shadow. Clouds move across the sky, the shifting light changing color, while mono chromatic shapes abstract the geometry of the buildings below and move across  their surfaces like the setting sun. 

Kaylee Clark’s Divergence is an experimental film produced with physical manipula tions of analog film. In this context, the mark on the surface of the film itself reads  as an interruption, blocking the passage of light, but in a way that is generative, con juring associations through its flicker, as a symbolic mark. 

Devon Lodge’s Life Gatherer is a quiet composite of three short cell phone videos,  presenting a woman collecting fruits and vegetables at different times of the year,  and lying quietly under a tree. The piece presents natural processes as themselves  marked by interruptions and renewal, the dying away of the Fall and rebirth of the  Spring. It captures quiet moments amidst nature’s green abundance, with a poetic  intimation of distant relationships, ultimately marking the passage of time,  required by these processes, with a meditative patience. 

In his animated film, Spring Garden Street, Zach Horn depicts the ever on-going  changes to a street, a neighborhood, and a city. Moving trucks arrive, renovations 

begin, buildings go up and come down. Through the lens of the filmmaker, the  changes aren’t so much something that happens to the block—an interruption of its  otherwise static being—but its very substance: the process of its coming to be and  passing away through the quiet aspirations and efforts of its denizens. 

Lucia Moreno Nava’s Amnesty 1986 is a two-channel video juxtaposing family films  of people and landscapes with an audio recording of Ronald Reagan advocating for  his 1986 Amnesty bill. The piece evokes a time when even the Republican Party’s  heroes understood the need to acknowledge the contributions of undocumented  workers to the country by granting them a path to citizenship. The video vividly  draws connections between intimate personal experiences and broad political de cisions. And it indirectly calls attention to the limbo in which undocumented immi grants find themselves now, with their hopes for a better future suspended by their  legal status. 

BOGUE is a politically charged dance video, produced by Santiago Echeverry  and performed by the Columbian voguing collective, The House of Tupamaras.  Androgynous figures, captured with volumetric data, pose and strut across the  screen, while rapidly carving complex geometric forms with their arms. On the  soundtrack, Soap Opera divas tear each other apart. Voguing is a dance form, in  which the movement of the dance is momentarily interrupted by the glamorous  pose—as if by the click of a camera’s shutter—only then to give way again to move ment. The drag in Tupamaras’ performance, and its rich digital mediation, further  intimates that something similar might be true of gender, i.e., that gender might be  understood as a momentary fixing, a pose, within an otherwise dynamic, fluid, and  evolving process. And the dueling divas on the soundtrack make clear that this is a  struggle that involves power and conflict and makes the dance floor a locus of po tential political change. 

Daniel Rutter’s Disguises is a silent animation, featuring three masked heads, pro duced with collages of watercolor paintings. At times, the masks are filled with the  eyes and mouths of faces; at others, they are filled with plants and vines, colorfields,  figures, and scenes from other paintings. They are split in the middle and combined 

in combinations that only intermittently add up. Like The House of Tupamaras’  dance video above, in the context of the show’s orienting concerns, they would  seem to suggest that identity itself—the mask of the ego—is only an interruption,  a tentative fixation, in an otherwise dynamic, unfolding process, in which who we  are always remains, in some respect, in question. 

Bridget Henry’s Omens combines poetry with animation to reflect on the power  of symbols in nature. The film begins with an over-abundance. “Out here, we  read everything as a sign.” The richly colorful images are weighted with poetic  significance, a coyote, a murder of crows. But then, what first seemed to be a sat urated with meaning instead appears to be compensation for a meaningless loss,  “I wish I could make sense of the child’s empty bed.” The film’s images appear  as vessels giving form to lack. And, in the end, the meaning of the title’s “omen”  would seem to lie beautifully in this play of loss and overfullness “Because we  can’t say what comes next we say, ‘the plum tree is blooming early.’” 

Janet Fine’s wind-up is a study in entropy, shot at the Santa Cruz dump. The film  begins with a steady stream of trash, tumbling like a waterfall, while Annie’s theme Tomorrow plays on what sounds like a discarded music box. In answer to  the song’s limitless optimism, the film presents the true fate of all tomorrows as  the dustbin of history. Your hoped-for future is always already yesterday’s news.  The film depicts this dynamic, specifically, as a symptom of consumer capitalism,  and the endless demand for something more, something new. This is other end  of the process: an endless stream of waste. There’s a despondence to the film,  pessimistically alluding to the crisis of the ecology; while, at the same time, the  artist clearly works to salvage some hope from the rubbish, in the form of her  film.  

Nicolei Gupit’s I Had a Kite begins with a Fillipinx song, sung over kaleidoscopic  scenes of street life, before focusing on images of a kite flown by children and  then, later, domestic images of fertility and old age. The kite flies, but only inso far as it is beset by the elements. It climbs, but also suffers lulls and slacks, fall ing from the sky, only to get tangled and torn in the branches of trees. The film 

beautifully captures life’s tenuousness, rich with desire and disappointment. The  song, we ultimately learn, tells the story of a kid who buys a kite instead of food,  and flies it for a while, but the kite ultimately breaks loose from its line and flies  away, leaving the kid regretful and hungry. 

In her Life is Circus, Judit Navratil presents a similarly playful portrait of pre carity and resilience. The somersault is a tumble. As a mode of advancing, it is  a fall—disturbing expectations like a form of clowning. At the same time, the  somersaulter recovers from her fall. She catches herself, finding grace in her  clumsiness, and indeed makes progress. Repeated as an artistic gesture, Judit’s  tumbling furthermore highlights the unique dynamics of the contexts in which  it is performed, the oddity of the somersaulter’s appearance in the scene, and  the connections drawn between otherwise distinct locations. This particular  collection documents the artist’s recent return to her country for the first time  in three years, chronicling her trip and honoring these sites with her simple  performance. 

And in his animated film Pulp Icons, Stewart Nachmias combines painted, paper  cut-out figures with photographic backgrounds of New York streets and build ings, to present a world of colorful characters, drawn with squiggly lines, and  moving to a soundtrack of psychedelic jazz-fusion. The film tells the story of a  good-spirited everyman, making his way through the city and his day. He’s a mu sician and a carpenter, who suffers ups and downs—starts and stops—but man ages to rise above his challenges to celebrate life through art and friendship. 

As reflections on the dynamics of movement, interruption, and renewal, the  works in this show provide a rich occasion to share and unpack our recent col lective experience of the Pandemic. They enrich our potential understanding of  what is at stake in this pause and re-start: the ways they don’t simply follow one  another sequentially but rather often co-exist; the fact that they are always with  us, an integral part of diverse facets of experience, and their connection to our  frailty, the impasses and contradictions that make us prone to interruption, as well as our resilience and capacity for hope. 

- Clark Buckner