Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.

— John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

For our final screening of 2024, Video Out has brought together a collection of works which aim to make sense of ourselves, the world, and the lens through which we perceive them. From deforestation and the persistence of vision, to elegies for aging bodies and camcorders, to Sufi stories discovered in cut footage, these six videos ask us to consider not just the images we create, but the ways in which they are formed.

Stay after the screening for a conversation with the artists.

Program‍

Convalescing Camcorder and Two Cats
2021
Rachel Stuckey
4:28
A video diary about aging technology and cats. Recorded on a JVC VHS-C camcorder.

untitled part 9: this time
2020
Jayce Salloum
6:13
Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan. After my first year of art school in San Francisco in 1978, I quit, and headed to the Banff School of Fine Arts to do a year long residency program. The instructor Hu Hohn got me hooked on Sufi stories such as The Exploits and Subtleties of the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. Mulla Nasrudin is a Sufi wise-fool, trickster like figure. These books were chock full of funny little contemplative mediation stories. I would read these riding the bus at night and such, to get me through trying days.
Later in 2008, I'm in the central highlands of Afghanistan, in Bamiyan, where the colossal Buddha statutes were destroyed by the Taliban. A stark, arid, severe, beautiful landscape, people scrapping by, subsistence farming, much like my grandparents did in Syria. I'm filming scruffy little country boys in a new school built by Western troops. The boys are speaking Hazaragi (a Farsi dialect), via my translator but never having the time to translate responses. At the end of each session, we ask them to tell a joke or a song, something other than the conversation we’ve tried to record. Six months later when I’m back home and the rough transcript translations have been sent to me from Quetta, I discover, lo and behold, then and there were the very same Sufi stories – thirty years later – being told by these scruffy little country boys at Laisa-e-Aali Zukoor boys school, Bamiyan, Hazarajat, Afghanistan."

I am 164cm. مــن ١۶۴ســانتیمتر ھســتم.
2024
nazanin oghanian
23:25
Installed in the corner of the space, I am 164cm. مــن ١۶۴ســانتیمتر ھســتم. from the Patient #17301 series, is a two-channel video, with the two projected images sharing the vertical line of the corner. On the left channel, animated scenes are played which are completed in SketchUp, using virtual warehouse objects as props. The scene attempts to replicate the injection room at the Kosar Hospital in Tehran, Iran, where I received Decapeptyl injections every 28 days between 1998 and 2005. On the right channel, home video footage is shown from the same years (1998-2005), sourced from a personal family archive.
Engaging with spatial and temporal elements, I explore how montage can be used in a two-channel video in order to create a third space. I am interested in the ways in which new meanings arise through the relationships between disparate images, meanings that don’t previously exist in these images. Through my interventions in this footage, I explore how these new meanings can articulate the slippages of the memory on one hand, and on the other, in my body’s experience of medical intervention during the treatments.

Persistence & Loss
2021
Joseph Clark
2:42
Strobed remnants of historical logging sites cut down the myth of pristine Salish landscapes. A trick of the light in plain sight.
Content Advisory: This video includes flashing lights, which may affect some viewers.

Guardian of sleep
2022
Zachery Longboy
11:32
Inspired by a dream, Guardian of Sleep features an array of images that include animations of petroglyph-like markings, running herds of caribou and filmed footage of the baton-twirling artist leading a parade from a forest. The video was produced on an iPhone, a compositional method consistent with Longboy’s long-standing interest in emergent technologies and their potential, not only as a tool or a medium, but also as metaphorical constructs that, in this instance, mirror the forms dreams take as inherently collagist.

Camera Instruction
2024
Pablo Griff & Clark Nikolai
12:06
Learn how to use cameras using your eyes, fingers, and eye holes in this instructional video series. Pablo Griff—host of past documentaries such as Shoes: Who Wears Them? and Toilets: Where Does All That Stuff Go?—will teach you everything you need to know to become a professional pho-to-grapher. Don't forget your EpiPen!

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Banner image: Camera Instruction (stillshot), 2024, Pablo Griff & Clark Nikolai