Director
The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in response to the last frame of the previous minute.
Director
Artifice and reality, identity and disguise, representation and transformation are woven through a powerful pastiche of theatrical performance, mass cultural appropriation and fragmented narrative. Deconstructing an episode of TV's Miami Vice that features crude representations of Latino drug dealers, Labat constructs a multilayered psychological drama of converging realities. In a studio (the space between "cut" and "action"), artists Tony Oursler and Winston Tong provide commentary. Playing out a tragic drama with dolls, Tong also tapes his eyelids down and applies make-up, transforming himself from Asian to Caucasian, male to female. In a final confrontation of identity, Tong steps through the enlarged television image, devoid of masks or make-up.
Director
Tony Labat emerged in 1977 with the remarkable series Solo Flight in which the artist’s identity is given sudden form through subtle ethnic gestures.
Director
In a powerful collusion of traditional and pop cultural mythologies, Labat confronts his Cuban heritage and identity, and critiques the representation of this culture by the mass media. Donning theatrical face-paint and a wig, Labat transforms himself into an icon of Babalu, the Afro-Cuban folk god. His use of Babalu as a cultural metaphor is steeped in irony; to millions of Americans, Babalu is the theme song of Cuban bandleader Ricky Ricardo on TV's I Love Lucy. In other sequences, Labat deconstructs the stereotypical gestures and objects — macho posturing, jai alai, maracas — that are used by the media to signify "Latin culture."
