JOHN STURGEON & AYSHA QUINN
©1986, color, 26 minutes, stereo
video (available by request)
NOMADS is a collaborative dramatic video, with poetic asides. The tape delineates a couple's attempt to balance mundane reality's indelicate physicality, while holding on to their dreams, aspirations and spirit. The density of the tape plays between these modern, human realities and visual reminders of the ancient civilization from the "Four Corners" area of the American Southwest - silent echoes within the possibilities.
NOMADS is an "autobiographical tape drawn from the artists' attempts to balance mundane, material "reality" with their dreams, aspirations and spiritual lives... Nomads combines the conventions of a home movie, a science program, and a song-filled travelogue. In this mix, the artists add symbolic allusions as well as the electronic image manipulation, which is characteristic of their work, to meditate on central problems of contemporary existence: on the appearance and disappearance, or location and dislocation of th e individual in a time of tremendous insecurity and cultural change."
Bob Riley, "Histories: New Video Art", ICA-Boston '88
"Recounting a half-life of failed expectations through poetic variations of the refrain 'I thought I was,' Quinn and Sturgeon relate their generation's dislocation of change infinitized in the present to the disappearance of the Anasazi civilization in a potent perspective shift. Searching for the window of recurrence in the relentless curving of life back on itself, NOMADS locates incisive poetic observation in routine exchanges and reflections, consolidating five years of performance work that has sought a union of the metaphysical and mundane."
Michael Nash, High Performance Sp.'87
N.E.A. Federal Grant authored and administered by John Sturgeon. Funding made possible, in part,
through a grant from a National Endowment for the Arts, Media Production Grant and the New York
State Council on the Arts. Copyright: © Quinn/Sturgeon, 1986
Cameras: John Sturgeon & A.Quinn
Computer Graphics & Animation: Quinn/Sturgeon
"Road Songs", written and performed by Aysha Quinn and John Sturgeon. Produced by Aysha Quinn.
Musical arrangement, guitar and synthesizer, Tom Comis; audio engineer, Paul Urmson.
Synthesizer & Sound Compositions: John Sturgeon
Digital Processing: Michael Lyon, Mark II Image Processor
Cablecasts/Broadcasts: 1988: Video Viewpoints, Long Beach Museum of Art-cable series, (LB, LA, SF,
state-wide); 1987: Troy Newchannels Cable; PBS, Our Town TV, WMHT;
Manhattan Cable, Night Light TV, NYC;
Collections: Anthology Film Archives, New York City.
Exhibitions: Premiere - L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA; 1987
American Film & Video Festival, NYC; Histories: New Video Art, Institute of Contemporary Art - Boston;
VI VideoBrasil, Festival Fotoptica '88, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Post-Currents, SUNY-Buffalo, Buffalo, NY; East
End Art Gallery, Riverhead, LI, NY; 2017-18 Radical Software: The Raindance Foundation, Media Ecology
and Video Art, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; section: “Night Light TV”
Viewings: (numerous, including) Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina;
Museo de Arte Contemporania, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo Nacional de Artes, Montevideo,
Uruguay; University of Wisconsin, Madison.
References: High Performance, Video Poetics: A Contemporary Survey, #37 Vol. 10, No.1, 1987, by Michael
Nash, pp 69-73; Institute of Contemporary Art-Boston, Histories: New Video Art
(Cover Photo & rev.), Bob Riley, p.1.
©1986 Quinn/Sturgeon
