BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents Bending the Word, an exhibition that brings together four artists who re-imagine the art of storytelling: Martha Colburn, Patricia Esquivias, Olivia Plender, and Tris Vonna-Michell. Each of the artists actively re-interprets shared narratives, from ancient fables and religious texts to official histories and current events. Their work mixes fact and fiction, resurrects lost histories, connects disparate stories, and inserts the personal and anecdotal into larger cultural narratives. The artists take these narratives and weave new meanings and open up critiques through a variety of means, including filmmaking, comic book art, installation art, and performance art. Bending the Word, which is curated by Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator Elizabeth Thomas, marks the first major American museum exhibition for its four artists. The exhibition runs through February 8, 2009.
Martha Colburn—an American animator, filmmaker, and artist who splits her time between New York, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam—creates truly fantastical filmic collages that layer her original imagery with found footage. Her animations rarely feature words, but they are densely packed with fragmented imagery that collides and combines into a narrative. Myth Labs (2008) draws from biblical sources, the current war on drugs, and U.S. social history, weaving a parable on poverty, vice, drug abuse, and power in contemporary society. In addition to being exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, Colburn’s work has screened at many international film festivals; the Pacific Film Archive will present a program of her films in conjunction with the exhibition.
Patricia Esquivias, who received her MFA from the Bay Area’s California College of the Arts in 2007, finds inspiration in the history of her native Spain. Her Folklore video series combines visual evidence, in the form of photographs, charts, and ephemera, with Esquivias’ own off-the-cuff explanatory voiceover connecting the disparate parts. In Folklore, Esquivias, who lives in Mexico City and New York, mingles pop culture with Spanish history, locating that previously elusive point where Julio Iglesias meets General Franco. The series explains aspects of Spanish culture that remain in the collective consciousness, but are not chronicled in official histories. Knitting together trivial events, presumably but not verifiably true, her narrative is nevertheless seamless, belying the flexible filter of “reality” through which any narrative is constructed.
British artist Olivia Plender researches anomalous historical moments, producing comics, installations, performances, and videos that chronicle the intersection of social movements and individual agency. A Stellar Key to the Summerland (2008) looks at the sociological and political aspects of the Modern Spiritualist Movement in Britain and the United States, a religious movement that reached its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Plender’s piece details how the performative act of channeling spirits served an indispensable transgressive function: as a form of storytelling, it enabled women to speak out for social change, something they never could have done using their own speaking voices.
Tris Vonna-Michell’s performances capitalize on their live setting; narratives are constantly shaped and reshaped through each telling. This alteration acknowledges and embraces the fugitive and abstract qualities of the spoken word, in all its open-endedness and malleability. A UK native who balances his time between England and Germany, Vonna-Michell initially studied photography but has since turned to live storytelling and installation-based art. Works like hahn/huhn (evolving since 2004) are delivered rapidly and densely, with visual aids and props, to weave intricate fusions and confusions of identity in the biographies of three postwar individuals: Reinhold Hahn, Reinhold Huhn, and Otto Hahn. Vonna-Michell’s live performances are extended through installations that combine sound, image, and object to allow visitors to guide their own alternate narration of his chosen subjects.
The kinds of pointed narratives practiced by these artists show the processes of imagination and analysis, and expose the relationships between concrete truths and abstract notions, that individuals face in making sense of the world and their place in it. These artists have something to tell us (and show us) about what we may not be seeing for ourselves, how a straight view of the world can be bent in countless ways.
