What is it like to not recognize your hometownNULL
Phoenix artist Sloane McFarland and Homer's hero
Odysseus shared this dilemma - McFarland as he
grew up in the exploding metropolis of greater
Phoenix and Odysseus when the Phaeacian people
helped him finally reach home after many journeys.
PHACAEANS is McFarland's first museum exhibition
and is named with Homer's Phaeacian people in mind.
It opens at Arizona State University Art Museum's
Experimental Gallery at Matthews Center on April 1.
In a series of short snippets of life, desktop
video artist Sloane McFarland superimposes the
Homeric tale on the Valley of the Sun's melding
of untouched land and concrete cityscape. PHACAEANS
assumes the perspective of those living in an
exploding desert metropolis, according to exhibition
curator, John Spiak.
PHACAEANS explores the phenomenon of a city
growing around an individual at such a rapid
pace that he constantly does not recognize it
as his own Spiak said. It is as if Sloane had
an internet vacuum and sucked up all of Arizona's
culture, stories and lifestyles then presented
them online, allowing individuals to experience
moments in a calculated order and pace.
Almost two dozen short videos will be displayed
on a laptop in this exhibition. McFarland likens
his videos to calculus, saying they allow him to
take one item from a mass and define it. In this
case, the mass is the fluid story of Arizona.
The movies are shorthand for a particular
experience, a particular story, McFarland said.
McFarland is uncomfortable applying the term
video art to his work, which he edited on a
computer using the Adobe Premiere software, then
saved as compressed files to be played back via
computer.
Instead, he and Spiak use the term desktop video
with laptop projection, to describe the work
exhibited on a single laptop in the gallery.
The videos in the exhibition were created with a
consumer-available digital camcorder and a computer
cobbled together by the artist several years ago
when no personal computer had the 30-gigabyte
memory necessary to achieve his goals.
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