Film UbuWeb

Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn [Harry (Harriet) Dodge: Born 1966 in San Francisco, California; lives in Los Angeles, California. Stanya Kahn: Born 1968 in San Francisco, California; lives in Los Angeles, California] All Together Now (2008) Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out (2006) Masters of None (2006) The Ugly Truth (2006) Let the Good Times Roll (2004) Whacker (2005) Winner (2002) The collaboration of Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn has produced an exciting series of character-driven videos whose protagonists are, above all, under pressure: economic pressure, ecological pressure, and the pressures of class and gender (and, for that matter, genre) regimes. These pressures catalyze affective mutations and a sense of dislocation, a felling of (not so transcendental) homelessness. Responding to eco-social circumstances, Dodge and Kahn work from the ethoi that the personal is political and the aesthetic is ideological. In their work, then, the aesthetic -- including, crucially, the anaesthetic, and the anti-aesthetic is leveraged politically. These videos draw attention to the aesthetic itself as a fraught category, using the heightened consciousness created by the frame only to crash it, transmitting/effecting cognitive-cosmic dissonance via their signature punk-slapstick. (From: Dissociated/Dislocated: Thoughts on the short videos of Stanya Kahn and Harriet Dodge. Philips, Glenn (editor), California Video: Artists and Histories, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008.) ----------------------- These titles are available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. The EAI site offers extensive resources for curators, students, artists and educators, including: an in-depth guide to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving media art; A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online, a collection of essays, primary documents, and media charting EAI's 40-year history and the early years of the emergent video art scene; and expanded contextual and educational materials. RELATED RESOURCES: Staya Kahn on UbuWeb Presented in collaboration with Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn / and the Elizabeth Dee Gallery. Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.