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Nightmare City

: NIGHTMARE CITY COPY LAKE THE HORDE (Performance Documentation) Interdisciplinary Installation & Performance, 2010. An interdisciplinary performance piece in collaboration with Copy Lake that explores the process by which 1960s counter-culture, despite its former political and cultural potency, has become a flaccid caricature of its own values in popular culture. The performance reinterprets the songs A House is Not a Motel (Love), Hotel California (The Eagles), California Dreamin’ (The Mamas & the Papas), and Dreams (Fleetwood Mac.) Seamlessly merged, the songs are performed with lyrics intact but accompanied by and filtered though mangled amusical tape loops and washes of noise. The performance is punctuated by psychedelic projections, in which retro aesthetics and form are mediated by digital interventions such as wipes and pixelization. Vibrant dashiki costumes are spray-painted dull beige, tambourines and hand-made, pan-ethnic, mysterious percussive instruments turn prop-like, becoming totem-poles of multi-dimensional and occult-based dream catchers adorned with strings of Tibetan bells. The performance was recorded at sites historically significant to the 1960s counterculture movement in California, including Altamont, People’s Park (Berkeley), Golden Gate Park (San Francisco), and Monterey and was performed at Queens Nails Projects for the exhibition’s opening.

: NIGHTMARE CITY COPY LAKE THE HORDE (Installation Detail) Detail of videos. 2010.

: The Pixie Troll Witch Hour: Into the 3 AM Void with Carol Anne & Keturah DVD Publication, 55 min, 2010. Synopsis: Hosts Keturah and Carol Anne toy with time and space in this episode of the public access show that features mystical interventions with Princess Diana's spirit. Also, youtube artist Myles Cooper gives a rousing performance, Dad Fag, WORK and Schlitz Claiborne prove that you don't have to tune those things to play 'em, and all-around-general-muse Johnny Grindstaff attempts to transform from a barfly into a butterfly. This installment originally aired on June 14, 1996. Nightmare City's variety show, "The Pixie Troll Witch Hour," takes its cue from Jon Moritsugu's short, "Mommy, Mommy Where's My Brain?", "Wayne's World", "The Uncle Floyd Show", and Glenn O'Brien's "TV Party", but veers toward the silently incoherent. DVD available from Nightmare City Publications.

: The Pixie Troll Witch Hour: Into the 3 AM Void with Carol Anne & Keturah (Video Stills) DVD Publication, 55 min, 2010.

: Jubilee 2009 (Stills) Video, 07 min 11sec, 2009. Jubilee 2009 opens as two runaway teenaged girls arrive on the beach to contact the spirit of Princess Diana using their suitcases stuffed with occult supplies – crystals, Ouija board, Aleister Crowley record, candles, and several pairs of shades. As it progresses, references to Derek Jarman’s Jubilee become more apparent, particularly during the Ouija board session where the only dialogue is lifted directly from Jarman’s script. Jarman, of course, originally repurposed this dialogue, from the angelic conversations of John Dee. Through the dialogue, camera work, and their own performances as the runway teen girls, the artists attempt to investigate the process by which repetition can render gestures meaningless. This video was originally part of Nightmare City’s self-published TV-straight-to-DVD show, The Pixie Troll Witch Hour: Into the 3 A.M. Void with Carol Anne and Keturah (2009).

: Princess Diana's Soul Carriage (Video Stills) Video, 4min 46sec, 2009. In a spectrally damaged reference to television’s favorite canceled dance party, Soul Train, Princess Diana’s Soul Carriage features multidimensional dancers in an otherworld landscape comprised of footage borrowed from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Paul Sharits’s Word Film. The dancers, flanked by two rows of dancing Princess Diana simulacra, move through space-time to a warbling, psychedelic soundtrack of the supernatural. This video was originally part of Nightmare City’s self-published TV-straight-to-DVD show, The Pixie Troll Witch Hour: Into the 3 A.M. Void with Carol Anne and Keturah (2009).

: I�m 27 Now. Fuck this Rock n Roll Bullshit It�s Time to Go Back to School Mixed Media Installation, 2008.

: En Plein Air Nightmare City—armed with the tools and dress of the famed open-air painters of the late 1800s—will sit down to a series of Plein Air painting sessions. As the girls paint, it becomes clear that their crafted works of art have no resemblance to the landscape before them, but instead inhabit a popular genre of sloppy, contemporary, neo-expressionist paintings that exhibit a destructive and anti-authoritarian attitude of juvenile delinquency. This video will be one of a series set in some of America’s most spectacular landscapes.