In West Hartford, An Unexpected Introduction to Video Art

College art galleries are one of New England’s pleasures. After all, a powerful institution can accrue quite a bit in three centuries. Although some colonialist controversy involving historical figures with names like Hiram Bingham III is not unexpected.

There is one college gallery, however, that is remains somewhat below the radar in greater Hartford. The small gallery at St. Joseph College in West Hartford, CT, has around 2,000 objects and specializes in early 20th century art.

"Lots of people in West Hartford have never heard of us. This is one of the dilemmas that college and university museums face," director Ann Seivers said.

“Our primary audience is the college, but we also see our selves as serving the lifelong learning needs of our community,” she said.

“A lot of our older alumni visit. When they went to school, the art was in the hallways and the classrooms, so they literally went to school with the art. They love to come back and show it to their friends,” Rochelle Oakley, the Art Collection Manager and Registrar, said.

Despite this lack of recognition, the SJAG has begun to foster partnerships with organizations outside the art world and the state.  Under the tutelage of a new director, Ann Seivers, a former curator at the Smith College Museum of Art who specializes in prints and drawings, those relationships have yielded two small, interesting shows this summer and beyond.

Telling Tales consists of narrative drawings and includes works depicting specific literary tales, as well as works which merely imply a story. The show, which has been used as a teaching tool for middle school as well as graduate students throughout the summer, is run by an education professor and was created in conjunction with the National Dance Institute in New York and the Hartford Dance Conservatory to focus on developing an understanding of Multiple Intelligences. It runs through September 5th.

Another show, which opened in January of 2010, is Project 35. The yearlong show consists of 35 videos selected by 35 international, independent curators, of which only five are American. Eight or nine videos are shown for three months simultaneously in various locations around the world including Ecuador, Nigeria, Sweden and California.

“We’ve been trying to expand our exhibitions so that they include mediums that aren’t represented in our permanent collection,” Seivers said. “The college, like all other college, is a global curriculum so it’s an opportunity to expose our students to video art.”

“This current exhibition was a way for ICI to look back at its past and also show how its changed because video art has become such an acceptable art form,” said Seivers. “Video art started as a very democratic medium, and became a little more esoteric and exclusive and now has moved to become a very accessible art form again.”

And that goal is achieved in this round of Project 35 videos. The pieces are all accessible and serve as a pretty comprehensive introduction to video art. There’s museum critique (Azorro group, Yason Banal), use of found footage (Tracey Moffatt), the translation of semiotics into movement (Meris Angioletti), a rather successful nod to Vito Aconci’s Step Piece from 1970* (Vyacheslav Akhunov). And don’t worry, there is the requisite low-production quality video in which God is murdered by a gang of men dressed as deranged Village People (by South African artist Tracey Rose). And overall, Roses’s Cockpit is successfully surreal and the most visually arresting of the nine works.

While some of the videos are engaging and witty, particularly Anja Medved’s Smuggler’s Confessionary, in which she set up a video booth what was the border between Yugoslavia and Italy and intercut the resulting stories with home movies from residents, most of the videos point to the space where critique should be rather than actually enacting it.

Project 35, in it’s distribution model and its pieces, does demonstrate the reach of video art. And while many college art galleries and museums do anticipate trends, this one instead offers a space in which one where students and people from the surrounding communities can look at art in an intimate setting and consider its relationship to education.