SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN: "This irreverent, rebellious, and self-parodying film program takes on punk rockers, politicians, parents, and posers who fake it like they mean it. With curator Astria Suparak in person, the evening features the world premiere of Kirsten Stoltmann's You Think You're Punk Rock but You're Not and the S.F. premiere of Miranda July's new audio series 'The Drifters." - Alissa Chadburn, "Ladies nights, and days: Highlights from the Ladyfest program"
THE INDEPENDENT FILM AND VIDEO MAGAZINE:"Looking is Better than Feeling You is the real crowd pleaser, grounded in emotionally expressive narrative and gutsy performance art. Ladyfest Bay Area, part of the growing international movement of feminist political art festivals, asked Suparak to curate a program of short videos by women artists. Next to performances by she-rockers like The Gossip and Sleater-Kinney, Astria showed works by veteran feminist filmmakers like Kathy High and gallery regulars Karen Yasinsky and Shannon Plumb, including also lesser-known emerging artist and student videos. The program re-imagines feminist art history with Dara Greenwald's smart revision of Bruce Nauman's video performance, but also treads through new terrain in Jacqueline Goss' anthropomorphic adventure theory. Suparak's curatorial choices indicate a personal video art aesthetic that is accessible, immediate, and purposefully absurd." -Matt Wolf, "Astria Suparak: Experimental media curator as rock star"
L.A. WEEKLY:
"Brooklyn-based curator Astria Suparak travels the world showing experimental media, and this week she returns to L.A. with a collection of work by women. Highlights in the eclectic, often ecstatically funny show include
Dara Greenwald’s Bouncing in the Corner, #36DDD (1999), which revises conceptual video artist Bruce Nauman’s sundry 'Bouncing' videos from the 1960s. Here, a naked woman, shot from above in low-res black and white, bounces up and down in the corner of a room, her stupendous, triple-D breasts rebounding with wild abandon; subsequent segments include rubber balls, pieces of fruit and even videotapes, all cleverly placed beneath the loudly slapping orbs of flesh.
In Ann Weathersby’s Humane Restraint (2002), a woman is buried neck-deep in the sand on a beach while a male cameraman questions her. Their interplay is at once amusing and spot-on, capturing the always politicized relationship between the viewer and the viewed.
Selections from Kathy High’s Everyday Problems of the Living (200002) juxtapose the artist’s musings on morbidity with shots of her puking, defecating cats enduring the everyday horrors of expulsion. Hyperbolic and hilarious, the tape still manages to suggest real angst.
Interspersed throughout the films and videos are selections from Miranda July’s The Drifters (2002), a series of sound recordings made for the elevator of the Whitney Museum during last year’s Biennial. The conversations, like much of July’s work, involve uncanny moments of self-exposure and confusion, and find their edgy, almost painful humor in replicating shared experiences of embarrassment and vulnerability.
Suparak’s terrific show will set straight anyone who thinks that women’s media is on the wane." -Holly Willis,"Signal to Noise"
THE AUSTIN TEXAS AMERICAN-STATESMAN:
"A zaftig pink-haired tourist shakes her rear end for passers-by. A blindfolded woman hikes up her voluminous skirt and begins to shave herself. A clay housewife absent-mindedly drops her baby. Again.
Some of the biggest names in contemporary performance and video art celebrate women acting up and acting out in Looking Is Better Than Feeling You, a program of 16 short works selected by New York-based curator Astria Suparak.
Whether they're washing dishes while wearing a revealing bikini, as in Kirsten Stoltmann's Self-Reflecting, or enacting sitcom-inspired scenarios with a gorilla, as in Jacqueline Goss' Slapstickers or Digit + Dian, the women command our attention.
Intercut among the visual pieces are Miranda July's audio excerpts from a series titled The Drifters, which originally played in the elevator of New York's Whitney Museum. These eerie voice-overs about parenting and other anxieties reverberate on the soundtrack while the screen remains black.
Suparak wants viewers to work for their entertainment. 'I like making people sit down and use just one sense, either just their eyes or just their ears.'
Culled from hundreds of films and videos, Looking is Better Than Feeling You was inspired by Suparak's everyday experiences. 'I've been interested in this idea of looking, of the pleasures and intimidating powers of the gaze. I live in New York and can't even get my mail without confronting a hundred random people on the subway and in the streets. I can't go anywhere without feeling hugely self-conscious about how I look, sharpened by the verbal aggression and unveiled intent of strangers in the city.
'But,' she admits, 'I also partake in this power, this brazen lack of coquettish suburban etiquette.'" - Alison Macor
WITH IT GIRL MAGAZINE:"Kicking off the Ladyfest Bay Area Film Festival 2002, Looking Is Better Than Feeling You was introduced by New York-based curator Astria Suparak at San Francisco's Victoria Theater.
As a filmmaker, I applaud curator Astria Suparak for returning short filmmakers their rights. Often thrown together by the sole characteristic of clocking in under five minutes, short films in festivals are not given enough consideration and denied their rights to proper presentation. Under the simple onomatopoeia of 'jiggle,' every piece in Looking is Better Than Feeling You compliments the other. By juggling elements of the jiggle, an obvious consistency emerges from every piece - instability, dread and delight. Suparak showcases these female-produced films with audio punctuation provided by Miranda July's The Drifters.
Among the 14 pieces is Karen Yasinsky's Fear, which stages miniature wood/clay-like human figures against the backdrop of an airplane cabin. Although there is no jiggly flesh present in the piece, the film-image itself seems to jitter due to its stop-action construction. The figures sit dazed inside the airplane, facing one another's backs and emit glue-like teardrops. My connection to these characters lies in their instability: the shaky image as well as unmalleable facial expressions that seem to house secret eruptions of anger and alienation.
A film that did present the viewer with jiggly flesh is Patty Chang's Eels. In Chang's piece, it is the flesh of the eel which astounds. An unknown man stuffs three eels into a woman's buttoned-up shirt. Her whooping laughs and cries kept me in a state of dreadful anticipation. At the most climactic shove of the eels into her shirt, averting my eyes to the outer edges of the screen was my only tactic of escaping an intense feeling of guilt and dread. Eels is a piece which also tests our obsession with scopophilic behavior. I was mesmerized and unable to let my eyes disobey my brain's desire to look at this spectacle. So although everyone in the audience "ughed" every time the man approached her with another eel, we all knew we wanted to see it happen again . . . and again . . . and again.
The jiggliness of Kristin J Mohr and Kelly Hayes' Me Nome e Gal is not only in the last shot of Gal's buttocks shaking on a sandy beach. The video follows a Gal Costa (Brazilian singer) imposter in modern-day Rio. She sings, dances and jiggles her way through the tourist hotspots of the city. The jiggliness I found most invaluable to the piece was in its unpredictability - not in Gal, but in the bystanders. The video was unstaged; to see the uneasy reactions of these tourists was half the hilarity. The unstable, jiggly behavior of the bystanders was apparent in their tendencies to act shifty, ignorant or mostly delighted, with giggles.
Every piece in Looking is Better Than Feeling You had a fresh visual style that tested the format of short filmmaking. Suparak not only held the artists together by genre (contemporary lady short film), but also gave each artist a unique context by considering them as an element of the 'jiggle. Thanks to Looking..., my standards for short film festivals have skyrocketed." - Yoko Kumano. © 2002 withitgirl. All rights reserved.
RES MAGAZINE:"Programmed to Stun: Astria Suparak
Seduction is just one of the weapons in the packed arsenal of globetrotting curator Astria Suparak, who's cut a six-year, mile-wide swathe through the minds of unsuspecting audiences the world over. She started innocently enough, at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where she studied drawing and sculpture. 'I wanted to supplement my education and influence others,' she says of her early film and video programming, barely hinting that what she really wanted to do was blow the minds of viewers with unctuous erotica, politically motivated old school avant-garde retorts, hyperbolic tales, and, well, all the great stuff that hardly anybody shows anymore, much less puts together with loving attention to aesthetic nuance and fertile, thematic collision. Noting that part of her project entails seducing viewers to witness unconventional works, she also helps foment a network of artists and like-minded exhibitors. 'I'm basically meeting the most enthusiastic, proactive, forward-thinking people,' she says, 'people who are sacrificing their time and money to bring experimental works into their town, out of sheer love and a desire to share and learn with others.'
Recent Suparak shows include Looking is better than feeling you, a program of work by women, including Dara Greenwald's Bouncing in the Corner, #36DDD, which pointedly revises conceptual video artist Bruce Nauman's sundry Bouncing videos from the 1960s; Greenwald's hilarious take shows a naked woman, shot from above in low-res black-and-white, bouncing up and down in the corner of a room, her triple D breasts rebounding with wild abandon. Adolescent boys, and Living rooms screened recently at Outfest, with work about men; both shows triumphantly tout a teeming, vibrant experimental media scene. And if Suparak has her way, the shows will be coming to your town soon." -Holly Willis, "Monitor / Focus"
ART VOICE:"Astria Suparak, a 24-year-old NYC-based curator, is coming to Squeaky Wheel this Friday with Looking is better than feeling you, a program of contemporary video, audio, and animation by women. The show features work by Kathy High, a former Hallwalls video curator, Miranda July, Kirsten Stoltmann, and Shannon Plumb, among others.
The work chosen by Suparak for Looking… is far from the collection of angst-ridden, hysterical, screaming, fainting rants one might, unfortunately, expect when 'feminism' is invoked. These works address ideas of looking - of the pleasures and intimidating powers of The Gaze - in subtle ways. These artists are asking questions that cannot and will not be answered by manifestos; they are forcing the viewer to look, and to look at them and their lives.
Suparak culls curatorial inspiration from her everyday life… 'Many of the artists in this program are placing themselves in front of the camera, creating their own identity for consumption. These works ring familiar to me, of growing up so intensely aware of my body and how others create my identity based on it. What becomes my identity is filtered through others.'
Suparak takes this notion of manufactured identity one step further: 'I'm interested in the idea of authenticity- how it is considered a virtue, but faking it can be just as reassuring. The intent can stand in for the actuality. Everyone wants to be "genuinely" loved, for who they "really are", or at least something close to that, right?'
Confronted with 'preaching to the choir,' by presenting this type of work to young, hip art crowds at alternative spaces, Suparak responds, 'Unfortunately, feminism isn't fully established. I wish it was obsolete. But feminism needs to be introduced into every generation, because patriarchy is still the norm. The audiences [at the screenings of Looking…] are not always hip or an art audience. Some have never seen these forms or ideas, and they get really excited and want to try making their own videos that night. Maybe some of the aesthetics and concepts are simple, but that is just a different set of aesthetics and politics which still deserves to be shown, which still delights and riles up a crowd.' [One Boston viewer interpreted the program as] promoting negativity toward women, but Suparak cites her very mission as a positive role: 'I think it's really important that I'm traveling across the world as a solo young female without a companion/protector, creating and solidifying a network for artistic endeavors which includes, but also veers far from, academia and high-art realms. I avoided Hollywood and independent cinema for years because I couldn't bear to see one more flat image of a woman created to fulfill male fantasy…'
Says Suparak, "This program was created for adolescent girls who aren't involved in arts programs or film scenes, who haven't made their own work, and only have access to mainstream films. I am interested in women taking over their means of production, exhibition, and distribution, and women controlling their self-representation. The aesthetic is raw so girls can figure out how they can make their own work, and realize that "movies" don't need an impossibly expensive and unobtainable level of production.'
Suparak describes her editorial practice: 'I try to create a rollercoaster of emotions and tension, without undermining the gravity or poignancy of some works or wash out the upbeat tone of others. I try to maintain the individual works' distinctiveness. The works all link back to one another and several sets of ideas…'
SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY:
