Transformation Opera is a sound and video project by Amelia Winger-Bearskin in which music generated from four different video works merge in the center of the gallery. Personal and public figures are captured by video during moments of transformation, and then projected as slow moving loops. Sleepwalkers, Italian arias, trash TV, and tragic love ballads are warped to create the dreamlike musical environment
Shown at Vanderbilt University Space 204, Nashville, TN | Antena Gallery, Chicago, IL | Big Screen Projects,Big Screen Plaza, Chelsea, NYC
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AmbienTTransformation 2009 Amelia Winger-Bearskin Shown at ISCP in New York and the Urban Arts Project's Perform Williamsburg Festival in Brooklyn 2009 and Transformation Opera (Vanderbilt, and Antena Gallery) In reverse time the performer reverts through three stages: blackness, gold leafing the face and coating the face in honey. Throughout the duration of the video the performer is completely asleep, the sound taken from the monologue sleep babble that the performer spoke before the gilding of the face. From the included Medication guide for AMBIEN CR (Zolpidem tartrate exteded-release tablets): "What is the most important information I should know about AMBIEN CR? After taking AMBIEN CR, you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing. The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night."
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"Nessun dorma: The Transformation of Mia Farrow" LINK TO MORE INFORMATION ON THIS VIDEO
The Transformation of Mia Farrow and AmbienTTransformation are both works of video that feature performances done for a web cam. Both are testimonials that document a transformation while in an altered state. AmbienTTransformation was created after a month of insomnia; it was my first attempt to sleep with the assistance of prescribed Ambien. It was unknown to me that the video was created until the next morning when I discovered my office covered in honey and the video on my computer screen. Mia Farrow was on the brink of a low blood-sugar coma, having starving herself to near death (according to her doctor) during her hunger strike for Darfur that was broadcast on her youtube channel. Video testimonials provide the materials (and the data) presented, and the statistical formulas hypothesize patterns in video testimonials, popular culture, and transformation
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Seasick yet still Docked: The Transformation of Linday Lohan 2010 Seasick Yet Still Docked: The Transformation of Lindsay Lohan
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Lacrimosa: The Transformation of Concetta Serano
ROME (AP) -"Concetta Serano, An Italian mother whose anguish over her missing daughter gripped the nation for weeks was told on live TV that the teenager had been slain, allegedly by the girl's uncle, whose house was hosting the show."
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Transformation Opera, by Amelia Winger-Bearskin
REVIEW BY: LAURA HUTSON
The ability of an appropriated image to maintain its original intent can be manipulated to create subtext with far more subtlety, complexity, and intelligence than a brand new creation. The Transparencies/Transformation Opera exhibit combines two artist’s work, both of which contain original and appropriated images. Artists Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Vesna Pavlovic pose questions of authorship, the difference between reality and illusion, and the post-modern wonderings of the authority of the audience.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s is a charismatic and powerful personality that doesn’t purposefully seek out performing, but it seems to follow her around anyway. It comes easily to her, and in Transformation Opera, she recreates a space that is emblematic of a performer’s headspace, filled with grandiosity, foolishness, and dying dreams. Four videos, all of which feature sound in some way, converge to fill the gallery space with the ambiance of perpetual performance. Winger-Bearskin uses her own performances twinned with appropriated footage of (former) starlets Mia Farrow and Lindsay Lohan against a confluence of operatic vocals, shoe gaze, and honky-tonk.
In “ambienTTransformation,” Winger-Bearskin uses the turn of phrase for being a hyper-productive artist literally, as she unwittingly made a performance piece in her sleep. Actually sleepwalking throughout the entire piece and recording herself the whole way through, the video perfectly captures the restless energy associated with performers between performances. In her sleep the artist smears honey on her face and covers it with $150-worth of gold leaf. She is asleep, and yet the video is perfectly shot, and it is not necessary to understand the context of its creation to appreciate the appeal of the artist’s expressionless face being covered in gold. “I could try my very hardest to be earnest,” Winger-Bearskin says, dreaming of all the different ways she could manipulate her face, calling on her relationship with her young son to inspire authentic concern in a dreaming state of nonsensical logic. The childlike, diva-esque behavior of an artist performing in front of a camera is echoed in other pieces in the exhibit, like Mia Farrow’s over-the-top starvation opera, and in Lindsay Lohan’s Morrisey-tinged anguish.
In “Transformation Opera,” she spontaneously performs with the house band at Second Fiddle, one of the more identifiable honky-towns in Downtown Nashville. Succeeded by a piece that shows Lindsay Lohan in a tasteful, respectful, terribly sad analysis of her recent jail-sentencing, Winger-Bearskin’s light-hearted rendition of Willie Nelson’s outlaw country ballad “Crazy” reminds you that fame is good luck and bad luck, and opportunities taken or squandered.
“The Transformation of Lindsay Lohan” is a series of stills from YouTube, taken seconds before and as the actress hears her sentence – 90 days in jail. Blond hair and beautiful bone structure collapse as her face falls and her head drops, all as the first few measures of Morrisey’s “Seasick, Yet Still Docked” play. For a performer, the moments between being free and imprisoned carry the additional weight of transforming an identity. Lohan’s life is a well-known spectacle. In jail, she will be without audience, and what is a performer when she is not performing?
As so many videos are being played at once, there exists an inability to view each one individually. Victor Turner called liminality “the state of being betwixt and between.” Winger-Bearskin’s videos capture this moment - between sleep and waking (“ambienTTransformation”), between audience and performer (“Transformation Opera”), between celebrity and prisoner (“The Transformation of Lindsay Lohan”) – and, through the addition of sound and the careful proximity between videos and gallery space, creates a suspended liminality among her audience. It is at once unsettling and comforting -- a familiar feeling of unrest.
