Maria Dumlao: Work

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Is That All?

Is that all?
2008, Slide Installation with two projectectors and 160 35-mm slides

Is that all? is an installation of two alternating slide projections.  The slides are projected adjacent to or facing each other, either on two different walls or on two projection screens. The gathered images are edited and made into slides for each of the two slide carousels.  Each slide image is culled from a different source, but all feature subtitles.  The presence of the subtitles creates a previously absent dialogue between the two images.  The two projections suggest a new spatial relationship built on the tension of this dialogue, with the viewer caught in the crossfire between the two projections.

Interrogation Mark

Interrogation Mark
2006, Digital collage, variable dimensions

Interrogation Mark involves gathering both violent images from the current war in Iraq and pastoral images from various lifestyle magazines and books.  In the tradition of collage, the images are digitally combined in a way that suggest that dread, violence, and general pathos underpin popular images promoted in our culture.

Interrogation Mark

Interrogation Mark II
2008, Digital collage, variable dimensions

Brainstormers

Brainstormers
2005-2008, public performance, exhibition, publication, internet, and video

Brainstormers is an activist performance collective that is committed to bringing gender politics into the public dialogue and challenging the current power structure to change its ways. The Brainstormers are Maria Dumlao, Elaine Kaufmann, Danielle Mysliwiec, and Anne Polashenski.

Dailies

Dailies
2003-2008, sound, variable duration

Dailies is a project in which I create a daily news ballad using source material from the media by singing newspaper articles over sounds culled from that morning’s television and radio news broadcasts.  The news itself is transformed into a lullaby of sorts, while ordinary sounds of real radio broadcasts are electronically manipulated and abstracted.  Each day, a new world of source material is made available by the global news media and transformed in to a new Daily by me.  The result is a combination of tape collage with news radio.  Dailies imagines a world in which Pierre Schaeffer and Jim Lehrer could be the new Burt Bacharach and Hal David and I’m their Dionne Warwick.

Go Show

The Go Show
2005, performance, video, and television, approx. 120 minutes

The Go Show brings together a variety show’s ever-changing cast of characters and situations with a subversive re-envisioning of mainstream American culture. Its absurd and subtle humor imagines entertainment as a realm of open-ended possibility where French feminist philosophy is as much an influence as Monty Python. The four episodes of The Go Show each take on an different theme: religion, madness, art, and patriotism.

Preview EXCERPTS from each episode:
Episode 1: Goin' Churchin'
Episode 2: Gone Nuts
Episode 3: Pop Goes the Artist
Episode 4: There's a Riot Goin' On

The Go Show is the result of a collaboration between Maria Dumlao, Jane Johnston, and Elaine Kaufmann. The three wrote and performed in each episode.

Verging

Verging
2004-2005, projected slide installation with 80 35mm slides on a carousel
approx. 12 minutes (9 seconds per slide)

Verging deals with the peculiarly photographic tension of the still image.  I am the editor of a group of quiet, decisive moments that are appropriated from films.  The perspective of the camera in every image is similar (from behind a lone woman pausing within an architectural space or landscape), and throughout it serves to amplify a tense moment preceding an unknown decision or act.  Ultimately Verging deals with anticipation, expectation, and anxiety.  The series is now made up of more than 200 35mm-slides.  Each image is to be projected consecutively one after another on a timer.  80 images per carousel can be exhibited in each slide projector.

Loom

Loom
2004, video installation,40 minutes

Loom is a silent video that is made up from found images, mostly from classic American horror and suspense films.  The static images of empty spaces or architecture appear frozen or still, as if they are photographs.  The still-like image is then subtly interrupted by shadow play of some forms of human presence. Each segment is dramatically slowed down, so that time will enter as an important participant in the viewing experience.  The composed and subtle movement into and out of the single fixed frame creates an interruption to the still life or empty space.

home cut

Home Cut
2003, color video with sound, 2 minutes and 30 seconds, loop for continuous installation or for screening

Home Cut is a juxtaposition of image and sound from various domestic activities. Image and sound are cut to serve the purpose of sampling to create different sound instruments. Based on seventeen samples, the images are arranged to create a pattern. By changing the arrangement of the pattern and including repetition, there is an attempt to reconstruct the rhythm of the series. It is through the variation and rearranging that the pattern eventually struggles to find its original pattern. In attempting to get back to the original pattern, the samples are arranged over and over again, only to arrive at an even more chaotic state. In consequence, the composition creates a domino effect, where one pattern after another is recreated based on the last pattern. As a result, the only way to ever get back to the original pattern is to literally play the sequence as a reverse. Much of this work is a result of my interest in the relationship of sound and image. Home Cut is a conscious effort to reconstruct the process of a sound producer, as opposed to my usual process as an image producer. Much consideration is thought of in terms of rhythm and composition, as well as the expectation one inherits after hearing and learning rhythm.

katok

Katok
2003, color video with sound,20 seconds loop continuous installation using a television monitor

I use the camera as the instrument, which produces the sound and creates the image. The texture of the tree combined with my gesture grounds the rhythm and the spatial composition. Made up of small percussive movements, I intend the repetition and its continuity to become meditative in much the same way it becomes a drone after a while. The rhythm we find in our everyday lives (as in the drone of ventilators and lights or hum from distant traffic) is all created by a number of small distinguished sounds that make up a big sound. This piece may very well function as a drone amongst other sounds.

caesura

Caesura
2003, video with sound, 20 minutes loop for continuous projection

The ruptures become distortions and amplifications of normal patterns of seeing and listening, in much the same way that stutters can be natural distortions of the normal speech. Sound and image of the interruptions are made by the contact to the microphone and the lens and are abstracted by the patterns of branches created depending on how I swing, twist and move the camera around. I use the camera lens and microphone not as a representation of anything heard or seen, but as a point of contact of my performative confrontation.

((wave

((wave
2002, color video with sound, 20 minutes loop for continuous projection

Mostly recorded from the source of the image, the sound in this piece is often the sound of air as it is violently disturbed either by nature or by jet and airplanes slicing through the firmament, which share a similar sound frequency as the waves. There is uncertainty when sound is “real” sound or if it is added and mixed: as in the fading in and fading out of each sound, the blending of sounds, the sudden volume cuts, the loops, and the silence. There is not much manipulation in the image of ((wave other than setting the camera upside down and the occasional delay and the desaturation of color. By the simple act of turning the camera, there is a further sense of disorientation and dislocation with the image, similar to the effects of the manipulation of sound.

Eleventh Floor

Eleventh Floor
2002, video with sound, 9 minutes

Eleventh Floor is a series of travelogue of sorts; a navigation of the non-stop function of light fixtures and ventilators in hallways and corridors of an institutional building.


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©2007-2008 Maria Dumlao