Catalogue > At random

The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices reflecting on topics such as coming of age, sex, aging and death. Visual shifts within nine images spatially strung together, correspond to the voices loosely, reactive to the scenes invoked by the women’s stories, and to the emotive range of the voices’ individual and combined music. The piece includes conversations with women of different ages, backgrounds and circumstances, who reflect on their past and current hopes and anxieties, on their understanding of the concept of love, on a de-centering of self that comes with parenting, on touching and inhabiting an aging body, on their discomfort with an imposed gender label, and more. The protagonists are documented performing distinct activities (e.g. producing art, walking, cooking, playing an instrument, exercising etc.) in locations ranging from Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, California and New York, to Egypt and Romania. Additional footage reflecting one of the women’s dreamscape, was shot in an underwater village in Argentina. The video is 55 min. long, and is composed of a concurrent display of short clips that focus on a specific topic, and are each told by a single participant. The clips are threaded to form a web of themes and motifs, both verbal and visual, together generating an ongoing conversation (without beginning or end) on growing up and aging, friendship, love, motherhood and the death of parents.

An experimental documentary maker for over twenty years, Even has produced work which ranges from feature-length documentaries to multi-channel installation and interactive video work, and which, relying on almost imperceptible digital manipulation of slow and extended moments, aims to depict the less overt manifestations of complex, and at times extreme, social/political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others). Even’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Canada, Israel and Europe, including Doc Fortnight at MoMA, NY, Rotterdam Film Festival, RIDM Film Festival, Montreal, New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. It has won numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Visual Arts and Next Level Awards, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Award, Media Arts Award, the Jerome Foundation, Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others. Even has been an invited guest at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, Open Doc Lab at MIT, SXSW Interactive Conference, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia and others. Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France and Video Data Bank (VDB). Even is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.