The opening scene offers a look at the 'all American dream' incarnate. In a fifties interior an idyllic little family sits ready and waiting in front of the projection screen, all dressed up and ready for a quality evening of home entertainment: Welcome to 'The House of Sparkles'...
What follows is a kaleidoscopic succession of colourful patterns, objects and figures. Against the dÈcor of starry skies and seventies wallpaper goggled dachshunds, pin-up girls on gigantic lipsticks and extraterrestrial spaceships float through the image, to then disappear by way of the belly of an ascending Buddha.
Eric Nordhauser and Jamie DeVan had fun here with the richly illustrated lifestyle magazines from the fifties, the plastic, peculiar world of Barbie and Ken and the kitsch-to-camp switch from the esoteric new-age culture. This is all reduced to a reality of cuttings and wallpaper with refreshing, simple image-montages. No ingenious 'morphing' software to transform one image into another but simple cut-outs that slide through, above and past each other - a kind of cross between glittery children's stickers and animations from Monty Python's Flying Circus.
The images are accompanied by lounge music 'babbling' on with recognizable themes from the seventies and eighties. The upshot is a 15-minute-long phantasmagoria of sultry, floating sweetness, with nothing, absolutely nothing disturbing the idyll.
Nordhauser and DeVan have been collaborating on various projects since 1988. Besides their films, videos and photographic work, they provide video visuals for fashion shows and give VJ performances on club nights. With 'The House of Sparkles' they have made a tape that relies heavily on the imagery of VJ acts from the club culture. The tape is illustrative for how this imagery found its way to the traditional presentation stage of video art - the monitor.
On club nights the symbiosis between image and sound should have no other purpose than to bring the dancing mass to a state of consciousness where they can forget their day-to-day worries, and with this production it is no different.
Meaningless, unpretentious images shoot past, pausing briefly to prick the retina before quickly disappearing again. What remains is a pleasant audiovisual feel-good moment that you can experience without having to get out on the dance floor.
– Christel Vesters
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Soundtrack Piero Umiliani 'La Foresta Incantata' (Easy Tempo). Concepts (Humanspace) Dirty Fur (Humanspace) Languis (Simballrec)
Eric Nordhauser ° 1968 Fresno, USA
Jaymie DeVan ° 1961 Redwood City, USA
They live and work in Oakland, USA
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