Glas Valley Still


Glass Valley (or, does this building make my butte look big?)
(2013), video, 4 min.
(see additional credits below).

Envisioning Dallas's glass buttes and spires as an uncanny Monument Valley, this piece re-works shards of the historical West as mythologized in film and video, finding insights that seem relevant for the city today while considering new possibilities for our individual and collective identities.

This piece was made for Expanded Cinema 2012, a program of new video art created especially for the LED display wrapping the Omni Hotel in Dallas, TX, curated by Mona Kasra. The display is 999' in width or circumference and 193' tall and is made up of bars of light, with one bar per floor, effectively comprising 333 x 20 "pixels." The audio was simulcast on 91.7 KXT public radio. Roughly speaking, the left half of the video covered the front of the building and the right half covered the back. The display has a relatively slow fade that limits the speed with which it can register movement within the picture.

Omni Hotel

In 2012, I directed the first Expanded Cinema, leading the effort to create a template to enable myself and others to make video for this display, which was especially designed for the hotel's unique architecture and was among the largest in the world. Visible at a great distance and from many different angles, it provided artists a rare opportunity to share their work simultaneously with an entire city, including many people who might never enter a museum or gallery. You can see an image of the template, plus the piece I made for the display in 2012, Braille, here.

Glass Valley has also been shown at 500X Gallery, Dallas, in an exhibition juried by Gabriel Ritter, Asst. Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, projected at eye-level into a corner with the seam vertically bisecting the image.

ADDITIONAL CREDITS
(The sources listed below have been edited or manipulated for various purposes.)

Movies:
Dead Man (1995)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Stagecoach (1939)
The Unforgiven (1992)
The Wild Bunch (1969)

TV Shows:
The Rifleman tv series (1958 - 1963)
Rawhide tv series (1959 - 1965)

Other Music or Audio:
Cowboy Song {Juke Boyz Remix} by AnalogiK/DJ UMB
Bossa nova-style version of the Magnificent Seven theme sampled by dwiedergut1994
Child's voiceover by India Skipper, recorded by me
Some sound effects from freeSFX

 

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