VIDEOS AND MORE...

Loukia Alavanou, JJ Kawano, Group Mel-Air

18. 10. 2006 - 11. 11. 2006

vamiali’s gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition titled "Videos and more..." with artists Loukia Alavanou (GR), JJ Kawano (USA), and Group Mel-Air (NZ, ET, CN).

Athenian born, London based Loukia Alavanou works with video to explore themes of the familiar, the uncanny and the personal using found material and footage from different sources, starting from Hollywood films, Disney cartoons to last century black and white photographs. In "Burial of a Priest in an Unknown Village" (2006) Alavanou uses a photograph from the 1920's portraying civilians from an unidentified village who are gathered for the funeral of a priest and posing behind his exposed corpse. Loukia Alavanou de- recomposes the image: she cuts out religious icons, crosses and all kinds of ecclesiastic props, heads and body parts and merges them thus turning the still into an animation that resembles an uncanny moving organism: at first a Roman cross, it turns into a clock. The artist slowly removes layer after layer, emphasizing the selected symbols and therefore reflecting the camera's intrusion into this seemingly sacred moment. The gazes, the gestures, the props and the corpse, all seem to collude.

American JJ Kawano's work illustrates esoteric situations with phrases, text and images where melancholy and nostalgia are mixed with sarcasm to create abstract environments where everything is possible and language is usually subjective. Kawano works as a professional filmmaker in the film industry. In his short videos he is using recognizable popular music to seduce the viewer in an elegy of drumfire everyday life preferences. "My river" (2006), a single-channel projected video, features text along with music part of the famous classic Moonriver creating unusual and unexpected associations.

Group Mel-Air, a collective of four artists that work in china will present a projection within a sculpture or as they prefer to name this work a projected sculpture. “Group Reflections” (2006) is a new large-scale ambiguous mirror piece combined with a single and static projection. Their work celebrates the joy to work as a group but also is acting as a bridge to promote their individuality that is being revealed during a collaborative process.