Skip to main content
Donate

Images and Identity: A Bifurcated Video View

By Anne Bray
May 24, 2012
Support Provided By

Enclosed are two videos from Freewaves archive that you can watch simultaneously or consecutively, depending on your linear or multifarious mindset. While or after they both play, consider how your brain tries to straddle the two perspectives made by two Jewish male artists, American and Israeli, using words and images.

Israeli Jewish White Male by Lior Bar shows all the possible permutations of those letters with nearly equal number of identity variations.

While Rorschach Revelations by Aaron Bourget divulges a time lapsed drawing with a very subjective reading of its piecemeal elements.

Bourget's personal selection of linear associations contrasts drastically with Bar's every variation. Media reflects identity as starkly as a mirror.

Lior Bar shows how quickly identity can switch with the transposition of just one letter and how continuously it can evolve. What conclusions do you draw from them? We are each our racial ethnic gender national slipstream? Our subconscious formed in the underworld shapes our perceptions before our encoded bodies can enter the world or even open our eyes?

Could both answers both be right? Art asks the hardest questions. How do you answer them?

Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

Top Image: Freewaves.

Support Provided By
Read More
An 8mm film still "The Kitchen" (1975) by Alile Sharon Larkin. The still features an image of a young Black woman being escorted by two individuals in white coats. The image is a purple monochrome.

8 Essential Project One Films From the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement

For years, Project One films have been a rite of passage for aspiring filmmakers at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. Here are eight Project One pieces born out of the L.A. Rebellion film movement from notable filmmakers like Ben Caldwell, Jacqueline Frazier and Haile Gerima.
By Allison Noelle Conner
A 2-by-3 grid of Razorcake zine front covers.

Last Punks in Print: Razorcake Has Been the Platform for Punks of Color For Over Two Decades

While many quintessential L.A. punk zines like "Flipside," "HeartattaCk," and "Profane Existence" have folded or only exist in the digital space, "Razorcake" stands as one of the lone print survivors and a decades-long beacon for people — and punks — of color.
By George Sánchez-Tello
Estevan Escobedo is wearing a navy blue long sleeve button up shirt, a silk blue tie around his neck, a large wide-brim hat on his head, and brown cowboy pants as he twirls a lasso around his body. Various musicians playing string instruments and trumpets stand behind him, performing.

The Art of the Rope: How This Charro Completo is Preserving Trick Roping in the United States

Esteban Escobedo is one of only a handful of professional floreadores — Mexican trick ropers — in the United States, and one of a few instructors of the technical expression performing floreo de reata (also known as floreo de soga "making flowers with a rope"), an art form in itself and one of Mexico's longest standing traditions.
By Cynthia Rebolledo