Tony Labat is a Bay Area artist who has exhibited worldwide. Labat has worked with, among other things, stuffed animals, the Gong Show, canaries, peace symbols, the Puds, recycled paintings, and boxing gloves. He is on the New Genres faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute.

Tony Oursler's feverish videoworks convey the sort of ickiness a child feels when confronted by unfathomed bodily desires. Within kooky expressionist sets, polymorphous props lead their perverse lives, wiggling in puerile delight. Sounding throughout these delirious dramas is Oursler's narrator, whose droll voice drips with postpubescent alarm. In The Weak Bullet (1980, 12:41 mins), the eponymous projectile spreads sexual paranoia along its trajectory. Oursler's inner universe is a roiling theater in miniature, colored by a fear of castration. Still relevant after two decades, Son of Oil (1982, 16:08 mins) is a history of modernity told through the unctuous lens of petrol. Allusions to terrorists, the Son of Sam, and John Hinckley position the tottering tale within the media maelstrom of the early eighties. Murky clay figures cavort with quirky humans on the painted sets of EVOL (1984, 28:58 mins), a nocturnal drama of sexual confusion and longing. Finally, in Joyride (TM) (1988, 14:23 mins), Oursler guides us through an amusement park in which leisure is thinly disguised social control. In this cardboard carnival of tomorrow, hi-tech thrills are delivered with the precision of a computer.