Video Experiments

For the past 20 years, Brazilian interdisciplinary artist Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez has been living an alternative version of the immigrant’s American dream.Her 1988 U.S. entrée came in the form of a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Kansas, where she studied performance art, photography and dance. And though students of more cosmopolitan art schools might snicker at the notion, Ramos-Velasquez asserts that her time in Lawrence was critical to her creative development. “I had way too many interests that couldn’t be boxed, and they were extremely helpful in guiding me,” she says. At KU, she also discovered the work of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose cameraless film techniques turned around her own ideas of film creation and continue to influence her work. Cameraless film, also called cameraless direct animation, is all about recycling: The “filmmaker” takes pre-existing film stock and transforms it by scratching, painting, gluing and otherwise manipulating it to create new images and narratives. Ramos-Velasquez’s most recent exploration of this technique is “Disappointment,” a music video she created for Kansas City’s Monta at Odds; her work was a finalist in this year’s Queens International Film Festival. Ramos-Velasquez lives in New York, where she works as a senior editor and animator and where she and her husband, DJ Ray Velasquez, are frequent contributors to the city’s dance and performance scene. Her latest project would test any artist’s patience: a handmade film, she says, “based on chance operations, a Dadaist creative method widely used by John Cage…. This will take a year and a half to complete because it involves burying the film for a year throughout the world.”  Ramos-Velasquez and DJ Ray Velasquez perform tonight at 11 at the Record Bar (1020 Westport Road). Monta at Odds goes on at 10. The cover is $7. Call 816-753-5207 for more information.

Sat., Dec. 22, 11 p.m., 2007