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My video work explores gender roles in the Latino family, personal relationships, and how we perceive media images, stereotypes, and the distance between the ideal & the actual.
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| SIGNIFICANCE (Coming Summer 2008) |
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Significance is an experimental narrative that centers on Max, a 16-year old Latino, out to get a haircut. As he enters the barbershop he realizes this will be no ordinary Saturday. Time quickly moves from the present to the past as well as the future with characters coming to life from the photographs taped to the barber’s mirror. The film highlights the lives of seemingly anonymous people and the unforeseen consequences they have on Max that will inspire him to profoundly alter his life and the world.
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| FLOOD SERIES |
Eugene Rodriguez has a way with words: cutting to the chase, revealing what has been hidden, and interrupting conventional practices and belief systems. From the start, his focus has been on the Latino family, but in a way that stands out from other Latino visual and media artists, whose work often locates political resistance within cultural traditions. In Straight, No Chaser (1995), for example, Rodriguez combines the American avant-garde film (and Warhol in particular) with the Mexican telenovela in order to produce a stylistic hybrid suitable to his subject: redefining the traditional notion of the Latino family in order to account for gay desire, sexuality, and relationships. (...)
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CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE THE VIDEO SAMPLE (each image refers to different sequence) |
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| Buried and Unseen (Part I), 1997. |
Buried and Unseen is a video trilogy that follows two Latino gay men, George and Dario, experiencing what it means to build a long-term relationship. George is an artist and Dario is a lawyer. They are both in their mid-thirties.
In the first segment, chiaroscuro, George is awakened in the middle of the night by a dream. The dream consists of juxtaposed scenes of his working class childhood in Southern California and teenage memories of when he walked/worked the streets of Hollywood. When George is awakened, he looks at his lover, Dario, and is frightened by the implications of the dream. As he tries to go back to sleep, he begins to think about their relationship and what they mean to each other. Will they remain together or will they separate?
What follows is an attempt to shed some light on two gay men trying to find their own way to express feelings for each other and the difficulties they encounter. They have been together for six months and are feeling a need to connect in a closer way, but don’t know how. The dream is a catalyst for both of them to express the conflicts in their relationship, their insecurities, past histories, as well as the parallels to their families.
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 CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE THE VIDEO SAMPLE (each image refers to different sequence) |
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Buried and Unseen - Severence (Part II), 1998. |
The second segment, severance, finds the relationship between George and Dario in turmoil. Three months have passed since we last saw them and their relationship is beginning to fracture. The episode opens on George having dinner with a friend, Bobby, while Dario dines with his friend, Victor. The narrative parallels their conversation, cutting back and forth between the two dinners. In the course of the video we see how different George and Dario view their relationship and their obstacles to intimacy. |
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The Middle of Somewhere, 2003 - 2004 |
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The Middle of Somewhere is an experimental narrative which investigates media representation of Latinos, the mythologies of the melting pot and global citizenship in the 21st Century. |
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The Vanishing Point, 2005 |
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Eugene Rodriguez new experimental narrative video is coming soon... |
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