Trannies in Twilight Time

Directed by Nikki Lee Taylor

Director of Photography and Still Photography

Vanessa Briggs

Copyright Vanessa Briggs 2009.

Suite 02 -30″-

Suite 03 -30″-
Digital Drawings-Dinosaur Studies.
Copyright Vanessa Briggs.

Suite 01 -1′-
Digital Drawings-Dinosaur Studies.
Copyright Vanessa Briggs.

Summer Roadtrip 2006

July 28-August 12 2006

Opening Night Reception:
Friday July 28th
5-8pm in Seattle.

Ballard Fetherston Gallery presents the third installment of the One Night Stand Series.
The series is a sequence of one night only events, showcasing emerging artists, scheduled throughout the year. The Summer Roadtrip 2006 exhibit will remain
showing in the Gallery through August 12.

Highway 101 / As I row, Emily Leonard.
oil, 2006.

U.S. 160 / I met a lion heart
Tyne and Hillsboro / I will dream this dream of you
Emily Leonard.
oil. 2006

Hammered Again, Chris McMullen

Hammered Again, Chris McMullen

Motorworks II, Chris McMullen
105 x 75 inch, 2006

Motorworks II, Chris McMullen
105 x 75 inch, 2006

Motorworks II, Chris McMullen
105 x 75 inch, 2006
Chris McMullen(http://www.chrismcmullenproductions.com), a south of Georgetown welder, will be showing dramatically large-scale kinetic welded metal sculptures. The 105 x 75 inch Motorworks II is a conceptual V8 engine, metaphorically “powering” the
entire show, with its moving pistons, and sheer massive size. The piece, which will show at Bumbershoot this summer was part of a roadtrip to MARFA, and was shown in the Art Outside show in Austin Texas. McMullen makes a living as a designer and fabricator of custom metal work, both artistic and architectural. His main influences are Marcel Duchamp. Jean Tinguely, Richard Serra, Alexander Calder and Industry. He has shown with Vital 5 Productions, Secludes Alley Works and in the Bellevue Sculpture Exhibition.
Vanessa Briggs(http://www.vanessabriggs.com) and Francois Aleta, transplants from Paris, France, will show two video/mixed media installations that each explore the themes of movement as well as things that really go nowhere.

Sorrow: an allegory on vanity, Vanessa Briggs.
Mixed Media, 2006

Sorrow: an allegory on vanity, Vanessa Briggs.
Mixed Media, 2006
In Sorrow: an allegory on vanity, Briggs shows footage from her recent roadtrip to Nevada, aboard a Greyhound bus, while musing on her own trip to America. Using a non-narrative-emotional/narrative format, Briggs mounts three framed pieces; one contains video of her Road Movie, a loop of film capturing an inflatable roadside advertising balloon. The repetitive, pathetic image corresponds to two empty frames indicative of her experience of viewers often being more concerned with the frame, than the image. Briggs was born in London, and studied architecture in the south of France, and Fine Arts at the Beaux-Arts of Paris. She holds a MFA from the Fresnoy, National studio for contemporary Arts in Lille, France. She initially came to Seattle to complete a year long residency at Gary Hills studio.

Sorrow: an allegory on vanity, Vanessa Briggs.
Mixed Media, 2006

Francois Aleta (http://www.francoisaleta.com) will show a screen containing his latest essay Pondre, which he wrote, and transposed into a visual/pictorial font which he created. The black and white images are moving drawings, representing the alphabet, as a complete font which he calls Textimage. Each letter overlaps one another; each word and sentence becomes a new drawing and gives the rhythm to the video…a moving image, which is a drawing of the text.
Aleta was born in Paris France, and studied painting, medieval tapestry, and art history at the National Gobelins School of Paris. He left painting for other mediums. and now writes, produces video, digital drawing and sound composition. He has shown his work in Paris, Lille, Belgium and Los Angeles.

Untitled, by Francois Aleta.
F.A created a font where each letter is redrawn.
The text written by himself in French (Pondre)
scrolls in his own font on the screen.

Untitled, by Francois Aleta.

http://www.ballardfetherstongallery.com/

One Night Stand Series is curated by Sheila Strobel for Ballard Fetherston Gallery, Seattle.
Text by Sheila Strobel, Copyright Ballard Fetherston Gallery and Here Grow The Trees.

Bus Number 43, Seattle, Washington State.
Images: Francois Aleta, Vanessa Briggs

Anchorage/Alaska - Tacoma/Washington State - April 2001

THE VESSEL,

A video-fiction by Vanessa Briggs

The water whips,
I weep…

The gravity was generated
by the weight of our principles.

The water whips,
I weep…

Our principles had gone low,
we had to find the light.

Sometimes it appeared twice.

The water whips,
I weep…

The French had corrupted the boat
and we were far from shore.

The water whips,
I weep…

6th of January 2000, first new moon of the Millenium, at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France), editing in real time of The Phoenix, or the Inner Space, a 3 hour digital film,by Vanessa Briggs: while the film will be edited, Kasper T. Toeplitz will be playing with the sound of the film being edited while Keja Ho Kramer will perform also.

The performance will take place in the small nef, at 10pm following the conference of Georges Didi-Huberman.

Photo credit: Christelle Fillod.

Produced by the Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts.

A 3 hour film /A transactive installation

by Vanessa Briggs.

with François Aleta, Vanessa Briggs, Keja Kramer and Nathalie Michel.

images by François Aleta and Vanessa Briggs.

“THE PHOENIX or the inner space” : is a trans active installation which ables you to see the editing in real-time (35 hours of mini-DV shooting) of the film. The principal idea of this, lies on the fact that the presence of the public influences directly the editing and the body of the film itself.

This naked process reveals the movement of the film emerging. The time of the film is in the body of the public , in my body and in our body.

The shooting took mostly place in a brick-factory at Leers in the north of France which is the last old-style brick-factory of that region. The same fire has been burning since 1956 with a typology due to the economy of the beginning of the century. In a non social aim, the film has been fed with the sounds and intuitive knowledge of the site.

The shooting is always the intrusion of a body in space and time which disorders more or less the site and environment.We have questioned this by using characters who interfere on the site in a suspended time ; the intrusion needed to be slow with the intention to not disorder the fragility of the place , without having a fiction pre-established so that the story weaved itself in a direct confrontation to reality and mixed our own lives to those we were confronted .

Among the different themes approached, is the question about work : work as a human condition and from an organic point of view. This means the repetition of gesture as constituting the body , the economical structure as defining the nature of the bodies to come, the new economical structures and technologies defining new bodies. Irritation is in that sense considered as a concept of the repeated repetition : the repetition as the origin of the whole, implicating a global point of view : the hold of the repetition as a hold on the whole.

The choice of the digital media here, has all it`s sense : the digital media as an inorganic medium supporting an organic universe in which the brick holds as the world of repetition.So the body of the film constitutes itself by the constitution of the body and the constitution of the body in the digital video through the repetition of images.
In the video the mystical disappearance of the body is ‘’incarnated ‘’ by the presence of a UFO, the suspension point.The theme of the phoenix comes to support the idea of repetition and survival. So this shooting ’’ as slow as a tree growing’’, and these micro-events come as an acknowledgment of the site and of the living beings with a highly intuitive connection.

The structure of the film, follows the structure of the Yi-Ching, the Chinese book of transformations, with 64 hexagrams.

Who can finish the film?

who can finish the world?

If the world was not offered finished, who would dare finish it?

Fire by essence, an unfinished body …

The flame dances and the film is the dance of the body.

A UFO stagnates above the brick-factory, in a time of relief, without rupture.

Time after cruelty.

After the cruelty of work, of repetition. After…

The characters come to heal the place, to free creatures.

The crack : the crack isn`t in the film. The crack is the weakness of the film ,

the crack we won`t see, the lost place, the one we haven`t had time to catch, to shoot.

The editing is in real-time.

You come to see the film growing itself, you are part of the film.
You are the time of the film.
Your absence is the widening weakness of the film . The opening crack.The disaster.
By your presence, the film exists.
I need your bodies to come and inform the film of what they need.