Show Some Color (Part 2)
DV, Five videos, 5 minutes each, 2007
Project website on Fabricatorz
Produced by Fabricatorz
Producers: Deer Fang, Jon Phillips, Sarah Wylie Ammerman
Videographer: Brad Hoffarth
Assistant: Jon Thomas
Sound + DJ: Raf Canedo, Eric Zhu
Media Manage: Mark Hellar
Still Photographer: Bridget Lanigan
Funding of the project is provided by Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant.
Since race, gender, and class are fundamental components of contemporary American society, Show Some Color is a series of video projects intended to explore, through female perspectives, how American citizens represent and define themselves racially. Post-9/11, with the Patriot Act, and increased racial profiling, and the Jena-6 protests, America is at a stage where race is an increasingly more sensitive topic that most prefer to remain silent on, yet it is intrinsic to individuals living in America. Through Internet casting call, the project recruit women who desire to expose in front of the camera, to talk or perform on their racial identities.
Part one of the project focus on three young Asian American female. In the video three women have an hour long discussion about who their ideal boyfriends are in America. As contemporary Asian American women, they were born into an Asian family and grew up elsewhere in the mid-west and California. Each of them has a different understanding of sexuality through different dating experiences. The discussion ranges from family and cultural restrictions to desire, sex, drugs, aftermath of love relationships, and their futures. One of the most extreme cases is Kelly. With an American Vietnamese Christian family background, her experience with male had been mostly through phone chat line, and phone sex with male strangers had became her secret rebellion.
Part two is a simultaneous media event with open video production process, where six individual women created a five minutes performance video during a public event. The project frames the topic with amateurism and entertainment. Rather than advocating certain idea on race and gender, these videos parallel different and even conflicted understanding on black, white and Asian from six amateur performers. These videos were shown on public access TV channel 29 in San Francisco after the event. To create micro-celebrity effect for each woman performer and continue the dialog, the project further sets up an on-line platform for viewers’ comments and voting for the best performer.