The Post-Glass Video Festival 2010

Working Title: The Post-Glass Video Festival
Exhibition date and location: July - August 2010, locations TBD
Deadline for submissions: Jan 31, 2010


The Post-Glass* Video Festival will present works that explore unique relationships between digital video/film and glass, in light of the studio practice of a significant number of emerging artists.

We seek works that toy with phenomenology, materiality or social/personal experience of glass through video. For example, you may be working on an animation with clear glass subjects. Perhaps you wish to speak about the nature of glass through non-glass materials. Maybe you see something that is captured only through the tools and format of video. It is possible that your experience of a certain phenomenon is remarkably un-glass-like and evident only as a choreographed act in video. Or that the outcome of your artistic process builds an insightful or entertaining drama, best voiced through digital “film”.

In short, the relationship that you explore between these two media may be rational, personal, virtual, abstract, animated, narrative or process-based, as long as you have an understanding and appreciation for video as much as you do for its counterpart in material / phenomenon.

We seek works whose concepts may trace back to either the direct/mediated experience of glass or an active investigation of certain phenomena - optical, acoustical, olfactory, haptic, and yet, manifest only through the vocabulary of video. We seek self-contained video pieces, rather than documentation of ephemeral work unless it plays a greater role in the feature. Convince us. To this end, we also welcome proposals of new projects that you would like to make and that The Post-Glass* Video Festival could be a good platform for.

* This blog has more information about a “post-glass artist”.

To submit
Please email yukanjali@gmail.com with a letter of interest that introduces your project.
You may submit up to 3 works/ideas for consideration. Indicate whether finished /in-progress work or proposal in the subject line. In the main body of the email, include a brief description (upto 250 words) outlining the work - concept, narrative, elements, duration, methodology.If you are submitting a proposal, tell us about the video you would like to make. Attach image/video/sound files as needed, less than 10MB.

Please label attachments as follows: yourlastname_entrynumber_imagenumber.fileformat (eg. genius_01_03.mov for a movie file sent by Jane Genius in support of submission 1 and image 3 within that submission). Do not forget to list contact information at the bottom of your email to us.

We will contact you by Feb 15, 2010 to discuss details of curatorial support and a suitable timeline for the production of selected submissions between Feb and Jun 2010. We hope to make the post-glass video festival a travelling exhibit at various public locations. The venues are to be decided based on submissions received.

For more information and questions about the post-glass-ism and yukanjali’s last exhibit (How is this glass?), please join this blog or email us.

Les Instantanes by Julien Marie at Wood Street Galleries PA

The Berlin-based French artist who experiments with various forms of projection debuts in the U.S.A with "Matter and Memory" (through Dec 2009) at The Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh. I was fortunate to be able to witness two floors of his works. Completely taken by the artist's innovation with steel micro-balls acting as a material in slow motion (but in reality); indescribably moved by his ablility to empower the exhibit participant who moves blank paper pieces on a table to reconstruct a forgotten image through a projection.

Particularly relevant to this blog is the drama and ingenunity of "Les Instantanes". Kurt Shaw, art critic with the Tribune describes the work :"Filling the entire third-floor gallery, it seems at first glance to be a simple, three-part sequence of slide projections of images of droplets of water in reverse. But upon further inspection, the viewer likely will notice, when looking at the exposed mechanics of each projector, that each contains tiny glass sculptures on a constantly spinning wheel. Maire actually made these 1:1-scale glass reproductions, in which each drop of water seemingly falls and jumps back up out of a surface.
In effect, Maire has created a different kind of cinema -- creating sequenced images representing tiny, fleeting moments, out of something that is very tangible and real."

My own experience of the work was a simple sigh of admiration and sheer joy at witnessing the precious construction of a moment.

Image: Les Instantanes (1998) by artist Julien Maire. Credit: James Knox /Tribune Review.