That’s Show Biz! from Halsey Institute on Vimeo.
Newly commissioned by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, That’s Show Biz! is a short film based on a diary kept by Betty Huber. Depicting her life in show business as a circus performer, the diary recounts Betty’s fascinating life through charming, detailed illustrations, rather than words.
Betty’s daughter Fritzi Huber showed Halsey Institute Director Mark Sloan the diary, knowing his longstanding interest in the circus (he authored the book Wild, Weird, and Wonderful: The American Circus 1901-1927, as Seen by Photographer F. W. Glasier). Desiring to help the already captivating drawings come to life, Sloan worked with longtime collaborators Dave Stewart Brown and Nathan Koci to produce a video fly-through of the diary. In this video, Betty Huber cartwheels, swings on the trapeze, and soars through the air once more.
“In 1989 my mother was diagnosed with cancer. By 1990 she was given three months to live, but she stayed with us for another seventeen years, cancer free. However, this diagnosis set her to the task of telling her story, the story of Betty Huber, aka Betty Patrick, Parroff, Scheutz, Betty of the Sensational Kays, all in the pages of a tattered diary.”
-Fritzi Huber
This video was commissioned by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts in South Carolina. The images from Betty Huber’s diary That’s Show Biz! were supplemented by photographs from the Huber family album with images of Betty Huber and others in her orbit.
Executive Producer: Mark Sloan
Director and Producer: Dave Stewart Brown
Animator: Andrew Campbell
Digital capture: Rick Rhodes
Original soundtrack: “Prospect Waltz”
Composed and performed by Nathan Koci
Animated, Produced, and Directed by: Dave Brown
The Halsey Institute commissioned San Francisco-based filmmaker Dave Brown to create a video animation of the 23 foot drawing by Indonesian artist Jumaadi. Titled Diary of Dust, this animation give new life to this two dimensional drawing, with original gamelan music composed and performed by Nathan Koci. Jumaadi, part of our international artist-in-residence program, was featured at the Halsey Institute in Fall 2014 in the solo exhibition forgive me not to miss you not.
Diary of Dust is on view in the Video Cave at the Halsey Institute from October 21 – December 10, 2016.
For more information on Jumaadi, visit the web page for his Fall 2014 solo exhibition Forgive Me Not To Miss You Not at the Halsey.
Emmett Still
2016
A Short Film by Fahamu Pecou
Runtime: 14.45 minutes
With original soundtrack featuring: Fahamu Pecou, Killer Mike, DFocis, Ekundayo, AlletheHuman
This soundtrack is dedicated to the many men, women and families whose lives are forever impacted by the violent disruption of systemic racism, prejudice and extra-legal police activity. #BlackLivesMatter
All songs recorded, mixed and mastered by Amond Jackson at Salem Psalms, Atlanta GA
Executive Producers: Karen Marie Mason & Fahamu Pecou
PLEASE BE AWARE: This film contains strong language that may not be suitable for all.
Video by Erwin Redl on his installation Cubes (3×16) as part of his exhibition Erwin Redl: Rational Exuberance at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, May 2016.
Light Installation with 3 x 16 Aluminum Cubes With Programmed White LEDs and Fiber-optic Cables
Cubes Arranged on Floor in Three Groups:
Circle of 16 Cubes
4×4 Square Grif of 16 Cubes
Straight Line of 16 Cubes
6 x 6 x 6 in / 15 x 15 x 15 cm each cube (length x width x height)
35 x 19 ft / 10.7 x 5.8 m total (length x width)
(overall dimensions and configuration variable)
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
Charleston, South Carolina, USA
This video was created in the Halsey Institute galleries during Jumaadi’s two month residency. Local musician Livy Conner performs her original song, Bloodline, from her album Mind of Your Own, with shadow puppets by Jumaadi, performed by Riki Matsuda and Jumaadi. The video was shot and edited by Justin Nathanson of The Cut Company.
Director & Editor: Dave Stewart Brown
Original Score: Andrew Walker
Executive Producer: Mark Sloan
Cinematography: Dave Stewart Brown & Tim McManus
Aerial: Stu & Drew Productions
This video was produced to accompany the exhibition
THE INSISTENT IMAGE: RECURRENT MOTIFS IN THE ART OF SHEPARD FAIREY AND JASPER JOHNS
MAY 22 – JULY 12, 2014
Organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts
The exhibition and video have been made possible by generous support from:
Hennessy, Obey, Sapporo, Francis Marion Hotel, Garden & Gun, Charleston Magazine, Charleston City Paper, City of Charleston, College of Charleston, School of the Arts.
Baker and Cortney Bishop, Garey and Diane DeAngelis, Edith Howle and Rick Throckmorton, Janyce McMenamin, Kate and Lindsay Nevin, Michael and Lisa Roy, Sandi Turner and Chris Wyrick, John and Karen Vournakis
Special Thanks to
Shepard Fairey, Dan Flores, Amanda Fairey, Nicholas Bowers, Zarathustra James, Rob Zagula, Jon Furlong, Angela Chvarak, Lorrie Boula, Victoria Yarnish, Kathryn Zenowitz, Scott Watson, Tim Keane, Steven Dopp, Scott Blackwell, Ann Marshall, Frank Haygood, Michael Shemtov, Michael Miller, Brett Novak, John Cordray, Kathryn Norton, Dean Valerie Morris, Andrew Steever, Jordan Fowler, Tatjana Beylotte, Karen Ann Myers, Lizz Biswell, Maggie David, Emily Rigsby, Colin Johnson, Nicole Hamblet, Katie Nocella, Caitlin Murphy, Heather Thornton, Haley Pierce, Tomoko Watarikawa, Paige Kline, Kevin Koozer, Jonathan Stout, Nic Roberts, Chad Reynolds.
I Can Heal, 2013
6 minutes
Commissioned for the exhibition Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman
Executive Producer: Mark Sloan
Producer: Brady Welch
Directed by: Colin Sonner & Brady Welch
Cinematography by: Colin Sonner
Edited by: Meghan Sims
Original Score by: Bill Carson
Color Correction by: Evan Kultangwatana
Sound Design by: Roger Middenway
Special thanks to Jim Ross of the Washington Canoe Club & The Hill Family of Cabin Creek Heritage Farm.
The film I Can Heal explores the world of Renée Stout by way of Fatima Mayfield, an urban conjure woman created by the artist as an alter-ego and vector. Whether as equal opposites or as corresponding echoes, the relationship between the two is porous and shifting. A number of motifs throughout the film speak to this, most notably the narration, which is conceived as an audio palimpsest of two voices merging and diverging, recalling each other, and “sliding” over the course of a number of incantations, chants, and parables. The passages themselves are taken from the exhibition’s accompanying glossary of conjure terminology, the Bible’s Parable of the Sower, and a lover’s recipe recounted by Zora Neale Hurston in her book Mules and Men.
Funding for this project has been generously provided by Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Additional support was provided by Accola Griefen Gallery in New York City, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., and Zanatta Contemporary Art / Zanatta Editions in Shawnee, Kansas.
Directed by: Brian Damage
Original Soundtrack: Nathan Koci
Producer: Karen Ann Myers
Re-Breaking the Codex, 2012
altered book, box, collage, wooden stand
12 x 12 x 3 inches
This video was created to accompany the exhibition Rebound: Dissections and Excavation in Book Art. The video provides viewers with a look inside the publication Doug Beube: Rebreaking the Codex.
The publication of a recent monograph about Doug Beube’s thirty-year practice of bookwork, collage and mixed media is irreverently altered by cutting, gouging and collaging the original book. The aggressive modification of Beube’s own publication is ironically contemptuous. By surgically cutting into both the front and backside of Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex, as if it’s an archeological dig or medical dissection, reveals the different layers of his artwork. Like the red indices of a dictionary, for example, that organizes the letters of the alphabet, the thinly sliced pages of Beube’s bookwork reveals a summary of various colorful chapters and illegible texts.
Not until viewers turn the pages of the book do they see the interventions between the reproductions, written text, cut and gouged out pages that disrupts an unhindered read. The reader is constantly reminded that the surface of each page is expandable (and expendable) or references another; it’s not solid, it’s a fluid space. As metaphor, each oblong cut becomes a ‘hyper-link,’ a subtext to previous and forthcoming pages.
Artist Long-Bin Chen explores different cultural meanings, and seeks to combine ideas and concepts from the East with those of the West. He incorporates such Asian iconography as Buddha heads and Japanese warrior figures, as well as imagery from other cultures, into his work. He chooses to work with local printed material from the communities in which he is an artist in residence, including telephone books, magazines, and other cultural debris of our information society. At first glance, the sculptures appear to be stonework, and most viewers are surprised to learn that Chen’s sculptures are soft and made from paper.
His more recent works are large-scale Buddha heads carved from piles of phone books. The Buddha sculptures represent the missing heads of many ancient Buddha figures that have been looted from Asia and sold to Western museums and collectors. Since colonial times, Westerners have taken heads from the Buddha statues in Asia and brought them back to the West. While one finds so many Buddha heads in Western museums and galleries, an equal number of Buddha bodies in Asia are headless. When carved into phone books, Chen’s Buddha heads contain the names and numbers of millions of residents. These heads represent caring Buddhas from the East who have come to take care of the West.
To learn more about Long-Bin Chen, please visit http://www.longbinchen.com
Slide montage by: Brian Damage
This video is to accompany the exhibition Pulse Dome Project: Art & Design by Don ZanFagna. It presents paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and a 3-D model by Don ZanFagna that explicate the futuristic and metaphoric concept of “growing” your own house. Conceived in the 1970s, he imagined a home created, constructed, and maintained by all-organic processes and in perfect harmony with nature. ZanFagna is an artist, architect, and designer whose lifework not only defies established categories, but challenges rote notions of the role of the artist in society. The advent of this exhibition has uncovered a vast trove of related writings, drawings, photographs, artworks, collages, models, and ephemera that the artist created over his long work life.
ZanFagna traveled the world researching standing stones, Mayan ziggurats, and various ecological systems, always in pursuit of underlying intrinsic structural concepts that might be adapted by humans to create habitats informed by these “invisible” or unknown processes. He pored over books, manuscripts, proceedings of conferences, and investigations detailed by Nature, NASA, and the popular press as he sought to uncover anything that might illuminate some aspect of his quarry on the art-human-ecology-technology continuum.
ZanFagna proved to be a restless innovator and inventor. His notebooks, journals, and early works overflow with remarkably prescient descriptions of such things as the development of the personal computer and the Kindle—“all the world’s books in the palm of your hand”—in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1971. He also anticipated large-scale use of solar panel technologies and the use of biological processes, algae and ethanol, to generate energy.
Don ZanFagna:
INFRA/ULTRA
Directed by Christopher Hanson and Aaron Neu
Original Soundtrack: Bill Carson
Executive Producer: Mark Sloan
Don ZanFagna’s notebooks provide an intimate look into the artist’s mind. Because the notebooks are somewhat fragile, they could not be handled by the general public. Instead, we commissioned videographers Christopher Hanson and Aaron Neu to provide a “fly-through” of ZanFagna’s notebooks in the form of a video. An original musical score by Bill Carson accompanies the visuals.
Following ZanFagna’s lead, Bill Carson did research into the Mesoamerican (Mayan) calendar system. He based his musical compositions on the overlapping cycles contained within this calendric system (embedding a 20 note melody over a 13 beat bass line, for example). The result is, predictably, hypnotic.
This video accompanies the exhibition entitled, The Pulse Dome Project: Art & Design by Don ZanFagna.
Moon v 11-11-11
John Reynolds & Lee Donaldson
This video accompanies the exhibition entitled, The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation, August 24 – October 6, 2012.
Work V. Work N. – Aldwyth – Fall 2009
Director & Senior Curator – Mark Sloan
Music – Bil Carson
Hand Models – Aldwyth, Rebecca Silberman, & Roberta Sokolitz
Video – John David Reynolds
White Days Unswallowed – Bob Ray
Directed by – Justin Nathanson
Performed at the opening reception of Bob Ray – White Days Unswallowed & Steve Johnson – From the Ground Up on August 28, 2011.