“In Hubbard’s roving footage we follow the shifts in spirit, age and racial composition of the demonstrators and witness the growing organization of the protest spectacle, as ragtag bunches of rebellious marchers give way to marching bands and the unfurling of the Names Project AIDS Quilt. … Yet his touch is always gentle, and deeply, if elusively, personal, from the opening shots of Hubbard embracing the late filmmaker Roger Jacoby to the beautifully choreographed hands of deaf people signing. Always working within a small scale and tightly focused format, Hubbard has developed an astonishingly varied and emotionally complex body of work over the years, a series of personal film essays of intertwined loss and liberation.” – Liz Kotz, Afterimage
L.E.S. (Lower East Side)
Coleen Fitzgibbon
1976, video, color, sound, 30 min
“The story of the collapse of the problematic island of Manhattma, whose inhabitants worshipped the god of mamon, John Doe. Shot in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NYC circa 1976. Filmed on Super-8mm with sound, summer 1976, shown on open reel videotape 1978 on Manhattan Cable Channel D, Collaborative Projects, Inc.’s Red Curtain show.”
The World’s Smallest Fair
Helen Hill
1995, video, color, sound, 5 min
While in art school, I invited my fellow students to help create one square mile of cotton candy in fantastical shapes.
Surf Girls
Katrina Del Mar
2005, video, color, sound, 25 min
“Surf Gang” is about the turf war that erupts when a gang of tough surfer girls travel out of their home territory of working class Rockaway Beach and arrive in the luxurious Hamptons. The Rockaway Ruffnecks, led by diminutive wildcat, Baby Rockaway, with their pirate flag flying and their rock n roll blaring, roll up into a world of ease and wealth made abrasive to outsiders. The local surfer girls call themselves the Ungratefuls, and are led by Blossom, an aging surfer girl who years ago reigned the seas, but who now lives in semi retirement and cocktail stupor in her gothic mansion overlooking the ocean. “Surf Gang” takes a satirical and sometimes slapstick view of class difference in a world of both natural beauty and fantastic embellishment.
Dog Diary: Part 1
Tom Chomont
1996, video, color, sound, 9 min
“The film diary questions the relation between reality and illusion in art. For instance, some viewers understand The Dog Diary (1996) as literal documentation. But while it is based on video material gathered during several days over a six week period, the original recordings run over five hours, and the finished tape is just twenty two minutes. Alongside montage and several video ‘effects,’ it also features superimposed sounds and pictures. In its finished version, it has a closer approximation to memory than the original footage. The largely erotic relationship with Dog was based on sexual fantasy, and the tape works to convert some of these moments into reflections on identity, power and representation. “ – Tom Chomont