Video! Video! - Breaking the Fifth Wall & Allie Shyer's Review

Video! Video!: Breaking the Fifth Wall
June 15, 2016
The Dojo
Chicago IL

The Jury (Rosé Hernandez, Jonny Sommer, Christopher Gambino and Julia Zinn) have selected the following videos to be shown in June 2016's Video! Video! issue, Breaking the Fifth Wall!

Home Alone Horror Story: Melissa Hespelt
Tuna Rice Balls: Stephanie Kang
A Conversation Between Old Friends and Cohorts: Jamie Zeske
PORTRAIT OF A NUCLEAR FAMILY: Drew Hanks and Eda Yorulmazoglu
Nocturnes for Anatomers: Christina Kolozsvary
Panodraama: Valentine Siboni
I Am My Own Keeper pt2: Gertie Garbage
Local Ads from Faraway Places: Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney
The Mourning Cloak Butterfly: Endam Nihan
remember / this / feeling: Lyra Hill

Allie Shyer also wrote about Local Ads from Faraway Places for the show, which you can read below:

"Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney’s Local Ads from Faraway Places is about vision and perception as much as it is about familiarity. The scrolling pace also propels a dialogue about how we see and what we notice. If noticing can be thought of as a place, then that is where Local Ads from Faraway Places transpires; within the territory of heightened awareness.

The first scene to scroll through our field of vision shows flowers positioned behind window shades. With alluring visual trickery, the blinds silhouette and then reveal the flowers, but the impact of light and depth onto the image makes it more difficult to comprehend.

The video continues to play with flatness and depth with the introduction of different planes, across which mice scurry, oranges roll, and Meg Ryan’s hair grows longer as she peels fruit. The repetitions and coincidences that propel Local Ads from Faraway Places allow us into the space where we process information and translate visual symbols using a back stock of knowledge that ties it all together. The fast and appealing clash of coincidences is what makes Local Ads from Faraway Places exciting to watch.

As the music comes to a crescendo and the video draws to a close, we are propelled into another room with blinds, similar to those in the first scene. On the television, movie credits scroll for a film starring Meg Ryan and a cozy bearded man snoozes in the corner. It is clear that the room is familiar to the artist—as familiar as light through blinds in the afternoon or a Meg Ryan movie. It is this familiarity that allows us to be transported through the act of noticing and dissect the mundane through modes of visual storytelling." — Allie Shyer, Video Video Zine, June 2016