Recent Works by Bobby Abate, Peggy Ahwesh, Tony Allard, and Miranda July Bay Area Premieres!

In tonight's program you'll encounter videoworks in which the textures of the telling are as powerful as the tale itself. Often the "stories" are embedded in poached footage, shifting aesthetic strategies, and fanciful references. Miranda July's Nest of Tens (1999, 27 mins) alternates four fables about personal power, nesting them in the glib trappings of the mundane. Something ineffable, like a disquieting murmur, stirs these stories into a surreal whirlwind. Tony Allard's From Here to LA (2000, 28 mins) is a journey through lands both electronic and ecstatic. The protagonist-part vaudevillian, part avatar-negotiates a narrative plane composed of cyberspace, TV transmissions, movie plots, radio broadcasts, and occasionally, the hard soil of planet Earth. Using disaster footage and filches from a gay porn site, Bobby Abate's Come Softly (2001, 11 mins) transforms keenly degraded images into a slo-mo tableau of eroticized loss. Peggy Ahwesh's She-Puppet (2001, 15 mins) brashly appropriates the graphical realm of "Tomb Raider," turning it into a proto-feminist saga, not of combat but of consciousness born of adversity. The bitmapped mock-ups of ancient tombs and foreboding crags become the low-res landscape for a new virtual identity.