Doris Cross

Manipulating a variety of sources, Vasulka uses creative imaging tools to situate historical images against Southwestern landscapes of incredible beauty. Contorting the images into a variety of isomorphic forms, Vasulka creates a literal shape for these memories, developing these shapes as metaphors for the processes of fragmentation, condensation, and inversion, that inevitably contort fact into memory. While much of the raw material for the tape is drawn from World War II and its rehearsals, the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution, The Art of Memory is really an extended meditation seeking to reconcile the blurry, banal photographs of historic figures with the mass destruction they helped engineer.

Against a field of swaying and halting yellow vegetation, another processed field: the image of the eponymous subject (performed by painter Doris Cross) riles and emits unintelligibly to the viewer. Conjuring the mystical biblical character Lilith, Steina's video layers both sound and image to produce an ever-shifting, frustrated presence.