17 short films from the Southern Utah Museum of Art exhibition: Jeanne Jo: What Am I Doing Here? (June 4 - September 24, 2022 ) RT: 22 min
Directed by: Alan Michnoff, Auden Bui, Camille Shooshani, Christine Serchia, Clementine Leger, Fangso Liu, Harris McCabe, Jamari Perry, Kate Stayman-London, Kim Ford and Jake Greene, Leandro Tadashi, Michael Kellman, Michael Schatz, and Oates Wu.
Essay by Robert Bailey, Art Historian:
Jeanne Jo is a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker who traverses the worlds of the visual and cinematic arts. In What Am I Doing Here?, she collaborates with friends and colleagues, all filmmakers, who cast her as the lead actor in short films that they then directed. The result, in which Jo draws on her background as a performance artist, is a stylistically plural study in displacement. Jo manifests through the visions of others and achieves a coherent self only via the accumulation of the characters she plays. The person who results is humorous, embodied, discomfiting, performed, and vulnerable. Her name is Jeanne Jo. What is she doing here?
The art world and Hollywood routinely feed off one another while also maintaining separate identities. As a traveler between these zones of cultural production, Jo contends with a split existence but also a more comprehensive sense of how fictive, narrative images shape selves today. When she is writing or directing a movie or show, she is making the popular culture on which we draw to tell the stories of our own lives. When she exhibits in a museum, she is instead a performance or video artist critiquing the conventions of that very culture’s fixations on attention and experience. Or is it some other way around? What is Jeanne Jo doing here?
In the films that comprise this exhibition, a simultaneously real and fictitious Jo gets put through a gauntlet of challenges, the proverbial ringer, but she thrives despite the cruelties of a world blessed and obsessed with images. From absurd scenarios to demanding tasks, Jo proves up to every occasion. Nothing blunts her overriding affects and their scorn for the inanities of a culture saturated with reality television and internet memes. Jo’s winsome pluck, shattered exasperation, and resolute grit register emphatically each time she flashes her knowing and unnerving smile, which disarms by concealing more than it reveals. What is Jeanne Jo doing here?
(00:05) Alan Michnoff, "I Can Take It," 46 seconds
(00:51) Fangso Liu, "Thanks, From All the Fish," 2 minutes, 36 seconds
(03:27) Camille Shooshani, "Steps," 1 minute 47 seconds
(05:14) Christine Serchia, "The Castle," 1 minute 12 seconds
(06:27) Michael Schatz, "Tunnel Vision," 36 seconds
(07:03) Alan Michnoff, "Clogged," 15 seconds
(07:18) Alan Michnoff, "My Vanity," 1 minute
(08:18) Kim Ford and Jake Greene, "High Tea," 1 minute 25 seconds
(09:42) Auden Bui, "Reconstruction of Personal Beliefs," 1 minute 12 seconds
(10:54) Clementine Leger, "The Descension of Jeanne Jo Rising," 2 minutes
(12:54) Auden Bui, "Smoke Bombshell," 31 seconds
(13:25) Harris McCabe, "Dreams of Falling," 40 seconds
(14:05) Kate Stayman-London, "Housemates," 1 minute 44 seconds
(15:49) Leandro Tadashi, "The Meeting," 1 minute 10 seconds
(16:58) Jamari Perry, "Wheel of Torture," 1 minute 20 seconds
(18:18) Oates Wu, "Zoologists," 2 minutes 27 seconds
(20:45) Michael Kellman, "Be Fruitful, Multiply," 1 minute 24 seconds