Arizona State University Art Museum
"PHACAEANS: Desktop Video/Laptop
Installation by Sloane McFarland"
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.
Arizona State University Art Museum - Experimental
Gallery at Matthews Center
Tempe, AZ
USA United States of America