Endings, 2008
TRT 00:02:40
video: Angie Eng
1st Kraft prize WPA festival, Washington DC, 2012
With unlimited access to content via the web, ‘Endings’ comments on our sense of time as an eternal loop. Cartesian linear time is irrelevant in non-linear experiences. This video adopts the approach of appropriating, sampling, remixing as an artistic process. In light of our dependence on linear time, the theme plays with our anxiety of the end of the Mayan calendar at 2012.
A later edit included a subliminal socio-political message. This edit includes archival footage of a 1950′s commercial of people and their shopping carts marching toward the camera. The video created was made for the beginning of 2012 film screenings to punctuate the end of the capitalist consumer world.
High Property Value, 2009
TRT 00:03:20
video: Angie Eng
High Property Value is about women’s subjection to societal values on beauty. An older woman’s feet are deformed from years of wearing high heels. An ironic twist on beauty is depicted by polishing nails of her deformed feet. The beginning shot of a veil that uncovers the feet alludes to the current crisis of European national identity, its fear of Islam as a threat to women’s liberty. Women trained to be uncomfortably fashionable in the West are paralleled with women in the East whose dress is designed to hide and protect. In both cases, women are both objectified and commodified.
Video: Angie Eng
Music: Simon Ho, David Weinstein
A video game piece in which the artist asked people to fill a box of memorabilia and personal objects. The objects were then manipulated in front of a miniature camera to create false narratives of 3 minutes or less without a script. The video was paired with overview shots of people moving from place to place. The video pieces were then given to composers to creat a music score.
Screenings:
Experimental Intermedia, New York, USA
Athens Film Festival, Greece
VIII International Digital Art Exhibit
Havana, Cuba
VideoChannel, Cologne
“Schpilin Aqui (Play Here)”, 2006
Experimental Short
Extended/re-edited version as “InterSECT’, 2008
Director, Angie Eng
Composer, David Weinstein
Producer, Voom HD Labs, Rainbow
Original format HD video
This is a short experimental cine-poem on the crossroads of two traditional cultures of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn New York City. Signage, architecture, cultural iconography and street life are montaged into a humourous take on the clash and cross over of two very different groups. Windows made from silhouettes of games, puzzles, blocks, etc. reveal street life of the Puerto Ricans and the Satmar Hasidic ethnic groups who live side by side. A humourous soundtrack parallels the imagery symbolizing the religion, habits, lifestyle of this ethnic neighborhood. Although the tension has subsided between the Puerto Ricans and Satmar Jews, the cyclical change of new neighbors and luxury development has united these two ethnic groups for the first time.
Screenings
2006
Anthology Film Archives, NYC
2007
Issue Project Room, NYC
Orchard47 Gallery NYC
Scanners Film Festival
Walter ReadeTheatre Lincoln Center
San Francisco Cinematheque
Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
The Executive drawing and animation series were inspired by Eng’s interests in the quantum world, mental maps, the collective unconscious as well as the over-pervasive epoch of the finance industry.
Portaits of the chief executive financial officer/advisor are drawn headless. In place of a head are lines and shapes that represent thought processes and psychological states:
An empty box refers to the cartesian mind, two men hang together like twins pinned to a clothesline, an exasperated figure with a deflated head sits in negotiations.
Eng predominantly works in video, but has been making portraits since 1993. She is not interested in capturing the physical likeness in a portrait but the psychological gesture of figures. Like her videos, the emphasis is on the gesture. Thus one notices the subtle thread of abstract expressionism and calligraphy in all her work.
The Executive collectives are more sociopolitical in their intent: A group of twelve figures shake hands in a circle forming one central tangled mind, figures descend on magic dollars, a city of figures are represented as mathematical functions, derivatives and integrals.
In her video Eng oftentimes includes her drawings. Thus the drawings serve as ‘maps’, diagrams or textures in her time based work. For the Executives, Eng made a series of animations that stand alone.
Drawings for animation series, “The Executives” 2010
25 page catalogue of drawings available, for inquiries: info@angieeng.com
Executives, 2010 Goauche, ink on rag paper
