Stuart Bender
-
Breath of Venus
The Earlier Known
Breath of Venus
Breath of Venus is a four channel video installation with seventeen music tracks. Four monitors are stacked sideways on top of each other to form a pillar. The figure of a woman rises swimming, starting on the second monitor from the bottom to the top monitor in an endless loop. The bottom monitor displays a digital animation of breathing lungs.
This video/sound sculpture is part of a series of artworks (graphics, sculptures and electronic installations) based on videotaped images of an artist who lived with cancer for seven years and died in 1984. It acknowledges the primal attempt of artists throughout history to reconstitute the reality of a person, memory or feeling - in this case through the electronic technologies of sound and light.
Press
Emotion and Light at Century Gallery, Sylmar CA 1999
Los Angeles Times, by Josef Woodard, Special to The Times
Four monitors are deployed in "Breath of Venus," by Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli, and they are stacked vertically, suggesting a figurative structure.
Dream-like, looping shots of a nude woman swimming underwater (an artist who died not long after the footage was taken), colored by abstract sound components, seem to maneuver up through the top three monitors. Simultaneously, the lower monitor shows animated lungs in motion. The piece reflects on mortality, the mysteries of the human organism and celebrating life as it inevitably slips away.
Silent Movies at Gallery 825, Sylmar CASeptember 2000
Artweek, by Holly Willis
"… Breath of Venus is a rather stunning piece built out of a stack of four monitors encased in a cabinet. The structure itself resembles a section of film footage, with each monitor being a frame.
In the lowest frame, an animated pair of lungs moves inward and out, breathing. In the upper three frames, a naked swimmer gently rises through the green and blue-hued water.
Neither quite an animation nor live action, the swimmer resembles a moving painting, and the piece as a whole not only plays with the notions of the specificity of the film and video apparatus, but brings to the foreground the impact of images on our own bodies. Indeed, it's difficult not to find your own breathing affected by the swimmer's endless movement up toward air."