I was excited about the beginning of the lecture and her early work. The combination of performance and video reminded me of a theater play I saw 8 years ago in Sofia, an adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita directed by Stefan Moskov. The staging included video projections interacting with the actors on stage. For instance, a character was beheaded by standing in front of a huge video projection of two hands tearing paper. The dark background behind the piece torn off coincided with the actors head therefore hiding it. The actors/characters in the play were treated like puppets as big hands or interiors of model houses were projected onstage. Given the fact that Kathy Rose did her experiments in the early 80's I was wondering what would happen in her work later on.
Her hand drawn animations imposed on her were great, she also performed really well in these pieces. Its no wonder she got NEA grants for these works. However, there was a break in her work that changed everything for worse. She began using more sophisticated video equipment and later digital equipment and it seems that she does not know how to take advantage of this. I would not call her newer work fake or lacking expressiveness. Rose seems to be confused by the medium. What happen in her later videos is behind the screen and this takes away all the life from her earlier ones where at moments I truly wondered what is the projection and what physical reality. Kathy's newer work also had little innovation, she kept on using the same images, even same samples, same music. She also did not contextualize her work clearly, besides Japanese traditional performing.
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