Showing 12 results

With wit and savvy, Kalin combines text, graphics and flowers with musical and political quotation to comment on the disjuncture between a conservative, medicalized discourse that describes homosexuality as both "unnatural" and "dangerous," and the possibilities of liberation involved in embracing the criminality of the "unnatural." A quote from Angela Carter's Sadeian Woman ("Criminality may present itself as a kind of saintly self-mastery, an absolute rejection of hypocrisy"), disco music, and hothouse flowers serve as counterpoints to fundamentalist agit-prop about gay sexuality.

Every Wandering Cloud is the first instalment in a series of experimental videos inspired by the writings of Oscar Wilde. Interweaving text from Wilde's “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” with hand-drawn animation derived from Edward Muybridge's “Human and Animal Location”, Every Wandering Cloud is a meditation on themes of freedom and imprisonment.

This piece continues Kalin's poetic and interpretative use of music married to vision, drawing on a range of images and textures to create a romantic reverie of a relationship between two men. With music by Annie Lennox (composition of Cole Porter) and on a quote from Virginia Woolf. Kalin's short video works function both as visual poems and as alternative music videos. With their astute conjunctions of image, music and text, these tapes respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s, more than a decade into the AIDS crisis. In finally destroy us, Kalin uses found film footage, home movies, and haunting pop music (Annie Lenox singing Cole Porter) to poignantly recall moments of love, shared and lost. The title is taken from Virginia Woolf: "But these meetings, these partings, finally destroy us."

In I hung back, held fire, danced and lied Kalin confronts loss, intimacy and estrangement. This visually arresting piece is constructed of Super-8 fragments that document familiar and foreign spaces, lovers and strangers. Rapidly intercut with these images are brief glimpses of names of individuals who have died from AIDS — some famous, others not so well known — that further notions of anonymity and immortality. Kalin's imagery serves as an 'imprint' of the living world, preserving for an unknown viewer personal experiences that have already fled.

Spot made by this former member of Grand Fury. This highly stylized and deftly edited provocation features a cast of performers, diverse in national origin, who recite a litany of statements meant to challenge viewers' secure notions of national identity. Kalin asserts that bodies are very real battlegrounds, territories that are contested and controlled by the same political forces that determine borders or set national policies. Nation was created as part of "TRANS-VOICES", an international multi-media public art project that was conceived to reflect a broad spectrum of cultural diversity — national, racial, and ethnic — that characterizes both France and America today. Created by seven American and seven French artists, the video spots operate as trans-cultural investigations, questioning the validity of national identity, exploring the origins of cultural ideology, and charging the ethics of government entities. The spots communicate messages about the fundamental social, political, economic and ecological shifts that mark the close of the 20th century.