60.30.1 Light Installation opens Dec. 8, 5pm

I have been busily working the past month or two on an 11-site installation over three campuses of Harvard University.  60.30.1 commemorates the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 30 articles of the Declaration will be projected onto buildings in Harvard Yard, Harvard Law School, and Harvard's Kennedy School from 5-10pm on December 8-10.  On the side of Widener Library there will be a short animation co-directed and animated by Norah Solorzano that depicts the entire document.

We've used a stenciled spray paint look to simulate graffiti on the buildings - representing how it has become subversive to talk about basic rights which should be guaranteed to everyone.

I am the project's artistic director, and it is produced by the University Committee on Human Rights Studies, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and the Film Study Center (of which I am Interim Assistant Director).  Special thanks to Steven Brzozowski from the Carr Center, Lauren Herman from UCHRS, and Greg Morrow from Media Services for all their hard work.

Please come to the official launch of the installation at 5pm on Monday, December 8 outside Widener Library (Harvard Yard, Cambridge).  Prof. Jacqueline Bhabha (Director, UCHRS) will kick off a week of events and activities around the Declaration's 60th Anniversary. Refreshments will be served. 

Click here for more information about Harvard's activities around the anniversary.

25th & Mission to Play at Boston Asian American Film Festival October 24

My short film “25th & Mission” (7 min, 2007) is playing at the Boston Asian American Film Festival on Friday, October 24 at 8:00pm at Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, located in Josiah Quincy School, 90 Tyler Street in Boston’s Chinatown. It will be part of a program called “Good Things Come in Small Packages" (Click here for tickets).  Here’s a description of the piece:

What begins as abstract fields of color gradually emerges to be a portrait of four tiny shops in a block of San Francisco’s Mission district. They are as diverse as the community around them: a Chinese-run laundry, a Salvadoran hair salon, a hipster tattoo parlor, an art gallery.  As the camera hovers inches from its subjects, we realize that the seemingly disparate shops are linked not only by their location but also by their inhabitants’ loving attention to the beautification of the varied surfaces they work with.

DUALITIES Show at Swell Gallery, San Francisco

 

My first-ever video installation is up in the "Dualities" show at Swell Gallery on the graduate campus of San Francisco Art Institute, 2565 Third Street, San Francisco. The opening reception is Saturday, August 2, 3-5pm. My piece is a pilot installation for a larger work based on my "Lalita" film - beginning to explore the different types of documentation in Lalita's life (including medical scans).  I travelled with my subject to India a few weeks ago to visit her 89-year-old mother, which was quite an experience.  I'm seeing a pattern in my films, that every serious work I've made involves some kind of return to a homeland.

Keepers of Tradition exhibit

The National Heritage Museum in Lexington, MA, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council open a major exhibition called "Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts" on May 18, 2008. The exhibition will feature over 100 works by 70 Massachusetts artists who preserve and revitalize deeply rooted traditions. We'll see everything from Native American basketry to Yankee wooden boats, Armenian lace, Chinese seals, Puerto Rican santos, and Irish music and dance.

A clip from my documentary "Monkey Dance" will be shown in a kiosk accompanying costumes from Lowell's Angkor Dance Troupe.

Snow Removal in Montreal

I was in Montréal the last few days shooting a new video project and had the opportunity to observe the snow removal strategies there. It's like a military operation, with a $120 million annual budget and 27 sites around the city where they dump mountains of dirty snow to get them off the road.

I left just in time to miss a storm expected to drop 15-20cm of snow, followed by a dose of "ice pellets" overnight. Whew.