Video
Michael Lasater
www.michaellasater.net
Michael Lasater is a professor, musician, filmmaker, and new media gallery artist. He holds degrees in music from the Oberlin Conservatory and the Juilliard School, and performed for more than a decade with ensembles including The Metropolitan Opera, The New Jersey Symphony, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra-Tanglewood, and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Italy.
His training and degrees in video, media, and communication are from Syracuse University. He is the creator and producer of a number of documentaries on subjects in music and literature, with broadcast and distribution by the National Educational Television Association (PBS), Barr Films, Kentucky Educational Television (KET), and Coronet Film & Video. His work has won awards from the American Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film and Television Festival of New York, National Monitor Awards of New York, and U.S. Film and Video Festival, Chicago.
His gallery work in video, animation, and sound has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Significant venues include the Hun Gallery, New York; Art in General, New York; Örebro International Videoart Festival, Sweden; Vetlanda Museum, Sweden; artvideoKÖLN, Germany; Los Angeles Center for Contemporary Art; Kansas City Artists Coalition; Union Street Gallery, Chicago; Around the Coyote Gallery, Chicago; Contemporary Arts Center, Las Vegas; California Museum of Photography; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana; Athens Institute for Contemporary Art; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; CEPA Gallery; Target Gallery; Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; Pennsylvania School of Art & Design; South Shore Art Center/Boston Cyberarts Festival; and Georgia Museum of Art/University of Georgia.
video title
One, Two, 2008, rev. 2012, 09:27
Digitized archive photo, synthesized sound, animation
Showing one’s face via self-portraiture is, at its best, not just a representation of one’s physical appearance but also a reflection of one’s existence in human society. We are each the expression of all our inheritances, environments, influences, and histories. We are not single beings, independent and self-made. We are each a summation of all who came before us and all around us.
One, Two is a self-portrait of the artist as a young boy. The inherited complexity of this boy is already evident in his opening split image, one side a related, but asymmetrical, version of the other. In the audio, a single claves strike, doubled at the octave, mirrors the visual motif. The video, developing in multiple planes, and the audio, playing in an equal number of voices, express the boy’s psychology in growing facets, each representative of—perhaps–past, present, and future, but each derived from a genesis in a single image, a single sound.
