Screen Time
Alissa Chadburn
San Francisco Bay Guardian
March 20, 2002
Video art starlet Astria Suparak is on a mission to bring the freshest experimental works to the theaters nearest you. The 23-year-old New York curator makes a stop on her national and European tour at Artists’ Television Access tonight with “Dirges and Sturgeons,” a program of shorts by young and emerging artists.
Playful laments indeed, these new works use lo-fi aesthetics to critique high technology and mass-produced culture. Using outdated analog video modes, Jacqueline Goss muses on the fate of the individual in “The 100th Undone,” a personal history of cloning and biotechnological reproduction. Hilariously grotesque, Lawrence Elbert’s “Whitney: Mama’s Little Baby” is a baby’s-eye view of the pop diva. Also featured is new work from performance artist and videomaker-distributor Miranda July of Big Miss Moviola, now Joanie 4 Jackie, fame (whose touring program “Some Kind of Loving” was also curated by Superak). In “Getting Stronger Every Day,” July addresses mythmaking and media fables in the retelling of two TV-movie stories of little boys lost and found.
Astria Suparak 