Stereoscopic artist Vladimir presenting in Film 201
www.vladmaster.com
Portland, Oregon-based artist Vladimir will be making two appearances this week on campus: in Film 201 at 11am, Monday, March 26 in MUS 175 and at Experimental Tuesdays at the Union Theatre on Tuesday, March 27, 7pm.
In each appearance, she will be offering communal sharings of her Vladmasters, handmade View-Master™ reels that she designs, photographs, and hand-assembles.
While Vladimir sells these home-use nickelodeons at craft fairs and at boutiques worldwide (such as Milwaukee's own Paper Boat Gallery), she also unfurls her work in live performances, frequently set in movie theaters. Therein, each attendee is given a viewer and a set of discs and then is led through a story by a soundtrack featuring music, narration, sound effects, and ding noises to cue the change from image to image.
In her use of images of toys, neglected household objects, and odd ephemera to tell her versions of children's book stories, Vladimir can suggest Joseph Cornell (or maybe an untroubled David Levinthal) but her desires may be more for a kind of delight than any kind of haunting, the cinematic experience here inflected towards a communal type of play, a pursuit of interactivity deliberately, clunkily, and perhaps marvelously (in a surrealist sense) in-between.
