Entitled (2008) by Cauleen Smith

Speculative still lifes project desire on painters and attempt to collapse time by sharing mundane details about the contemporary conditions of life in some American cities. (The Flaherty Seminar, 2016)

3 Peonies (2017) by Stephanie Barber

3 Peonies is a brief, poetic 16mm film of a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. The reverence for beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field painting of high modernism that, in many cases, eschewed the banality of such “natural” beauty. The collaged soundtrack subtly contemplates mental illness and is gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape. (Stephanie Barber)

Dad's Stick (2012) by John Smith

Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father shortly before he died. Two of these were so steeped in history that their original forms and functions were almost completely obscured. The third object seemed to be instantly recognizable, but it turned out to be something else entirely. Focusing on these ambiguous artifacts and events relating to their history, Dad’s Stick creates a dialogue between abstraction and literal meaning, exploring the contradictions of memory to hint at the character of “a perfectionist with a steady hand.” (John Smith)

The Or Cloud (2001) by Fred Worden

A guided adventure for the eyeballs. And as such, also, of necessity, an adventure of the mind (how could it be otherwise?). I believe there is a current which runs at the core of all beings, call it the life force, a dynamic which in individuals reflects both the personal and the universal. Up on the screen, frames in motion, a rushing stream of articulated energy to resonate with that inner biological current. Adventurous eyeballing then, in the ideal, an epiphanous moment of mutual recognition and commiseration between energy forms. “There is a vibration which exists to enrapture and console us.” (Rilke). I like to think this vibration can be detected streaming out of The Or Cloud.” (Fred Worden)

Work (1994–1995) by Pelle Lowe

…strains a familiar image by Édouard Manet—Olympia (1863)—to reveal underlying relations of gender and power between artist and model. By way of a series of displacements, signifiers float like capital through a demimonde of sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll. (Pelle Lowe)

Elementary Phrases (1994) by Stan Brakhage & Phil Solomon

The profound nature of this concept will be better understood, and the positive study of it more successful, if we think of such an organization, in its temporal aspect and scope, as corresponding exactly to what is called in music the phrasing; distinguished both from the melody (which is based on the differences of pitch) and from the rhythm (based on the repetition of an arsis-thesis system). Like rhythm it is based on facts of intensity (nuances) even while its form is extended over a dimension analogous to that of melody.

Whoever distinctly grasps these ideas will feel the importance of what we must call the phrasing of a picture, and for example, the stylistic importance of the differences observable between the slow, full, majestic phrasing of a Veronese (that of Tintoretto is more suave with equal plenitude), the rugged phrasing of Caravaggio (powerful in its boldness, brutal, even a bit melodramatic), the essentially polyphonic and architectonic phrasing of N. Poussin, or again the pathetic and tormented phrasing of Delacroix. It is entirely reasonable to note a likeness with these characteristics in the music of Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, or Berlioz. (Etienne Souriau: “Time in the Plastic Arts” from Reflections on Art, Susan K. Langer ed.)