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From: ARTS news <ARTSnews@excite.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 18:59:34 -0700 (PDT)
To: ARTnews@excite.com
Subject: New video by John Di Stefano
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PRESS RELEASE
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V-TAPE and DSCO productions announce the release
of a new videotape by John Di Stefano
HUB
In a time of rapid and accelerated global change, transnational affiliations
and various forms of displacement, HUB proposes that the idea of home
is
perhaps better represented by the sense of being 'between' places, rather
than being rooted exclusively in one place. This idea of home as a type
of
'between-ness' is, in a traditional sense, an impossible space, but it
is
precisely this impossibility that offers a glimpse at a new way of thinking
about belonging. HUB uses the transitory space of the airport - defined
by
its comings-and-goings - to introduce the notion of disappearance as a
means
of articulating new ideas of belonging and identity. HUB proposes that
we
think of the airport as both a type of home, and a place of disappearance
-
not in the sense of vanishing, but rather in the sense of transformation,
dis/appearing. Here, home and belonging are no longer necessarily
articulated by territorial sovereignty as they are in traditional notions
of
nation/nationalism, but rather can now become embodied by diasporic
populations such as refugees, guest workers, intellectuals, illegal
immigrants, business people and even tourists. Rather than being an empty
space, HUB proposes that the airport becomes a rich and complex repository
of interlacing personal and political histories - a new place of belonging.
HUB explores how notions of identity and belonging are articulated within
the dialectical interplay between global processes and local environments
by
suggesting that displacement itself might be thought of as a new way of
belonging
.
New Zealand / Canada
22 minutes
(c) 2000
* * *
HUB has been officially selected for the 2001 Kassel International
Documentary Film and Video Festival (Kassel, Germany)
HUB is part of the permanent film and video collection at Emory University
(Atlanta, Georgia)
In 2001, HUB has been exhibited at:
- Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong)
- Betty Rymer Gallery - School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Ellen Art Gallery - Concordia University (Montreal)
HUB has been presented at the 'Video-Star' conference - Massey University
(Wellington, New Zealand)
HUB will be featured in the December 2001 issue of ARTFORUM
--------------------------------------- For more information, and for
sales and/or rentals, please contact:
V-Tape
401 Richmond Street, Suite 452,Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5V 3A8
tel (416) 351-1317
fax (416) 351-1509
Web site: www.vtape.org
e-mail: info@vtape.org
- or -
DSCO productions
15 Broomhill Road, Highbury, Wellington 6005, New Zealand
tel/fax (64-4) 384-8407
e-mail: DSCOproductions@excite.com ____________________________________
John Di Stefano is a Canadian interdisciplinary visual artist/videomaker,
writer, curator and educator. He is presently Senior Lecturer at Victoria
University in Wellington (New Zealand), and also faculty of the graduate
program in visual art at Vermont College. He is the former Chair of the
Department of Video at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and
has
been on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and
at
the University of California, Irvine. John Di Stefano's studio work focuses
primarily around video, installation and photography, but has also included
performance, book-work, site-specific, and public art projects as well
as
work in the digital realm. Thematically, much of his studio practice and
scholarly interests revolve around issues of identity and displacement
by
examining how concepts and perceptions of memory, space/place, and time
shape the articulation of subjectivities.
John Di Stefano has exhibited regularly since 1985, including several
one-person shows in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. He has also participated
in
numerous international film and video festivals in the U.S., Canada,
Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and in Europe. He has recently been an
Artist-in-residence at Videotage in Hong Kong. His video work has won
several awards, including the New Vision Award at the San Francisco
International Film Festival, and has been broadcast on PBS, American public
television. John Di Stefano curatorial projects include a film/video series,
and accompanying visual art exhibition entitled 'Not On Any Map' (1999)
that
examined how various physical and metaphorical concepts of displacement
havebeen globally articulated by artists practicing in a variety of mediums.
He has also recently co-curated an exhibition of works by Hong Kong and
Chicago-based video artists on the theme of the global city entitled 'Open
Cities: HKG >< ORD' (2001). Previous curatorial projects have included
extensive programming for the Los Angeles International Lesbian &
Gay Film
and Video Festival. ¸His written works have appeared in various
publications, most notably in the 'Queer Looks' anthology (Routledge,
1993);
in 'Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema' (Scarecrow
Press,
2001); in journals including 'Art Journal' and 'WideAngle'. His book-work
entitled VITALITY was published by Artextes (Montreal, 1988). John Di
Stefano have been the recipient of numerous grants most notably from the
Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec, the
California Community Foundation, Art Matters (New York), and the National
Endowment for the Arts (US). John Di Stefano is currently Asia/Pacific
Associate Editor of the electronic journal 'Site-Street'.
* * *
Group and solo exhibitions/screenings include: New Langton Arts, San
Francisco; Maison de la Culture-Frontenac, Montreal; Canadian Cultural
Centre, Rome; Galerie Caroline Corre, Paris; Wexner Center for Contemporary
Art, Columbus, Oh; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Royal Academy
ofArt, Copenhagen; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Watts Tower Art Center,
Los Angeles; Karsten Schubert Gallery, London; Friesenwall 120, Cologne;
Dogenhaus, Leipzig; Bruno Brunnet Fine Arts, Berlin; Articule Gallery,
Montreal; A-Space, Toronto; Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong; Gallery2,
Chicago; Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long
Beach, Ca.; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Cinematheque, San Francisco.
Film & Video Festivals include: Kasseler Documentarfilm- und video
Festival,Kassel, Germany; Europaishes Medienkunst Festival, Osnabruck,
Germany; VideoFest/MedienOperative, Berlin; Images Festival, Toronto;
American Film Institute Video Festival, Los Angeles; Amsterdam Lesbian
& Gay
Film Festival; The New Festival, New York; Stockholm International Film
Festival;Tokyo Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.
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