Jeanne C. Finley

This apocalyptic linguistic comedy meditates on the relationship between language, meaning and social decay and is scripted from "double-speak" language found in a variety of media sources. Drawing its title from the Pentagon's term for crash, Involuntary Conversion evokes the hollowness and free-floating anxiety that characterizes late 20th century culture. In a voice that could belong to a hypnotist or a government spokesman, a disembodied speaker recounts a string of events whose common thread is a sense of impending disaster. The mood is suspended somewhere between nightmare and deadpan and is propelled by a narrative as enigmatic as the language it exposes. The iconic shape of a fighter jet floating in a perfect sky has the creepy feel of a video game and the texture of television is used to make the images feel domestically ingrained.

On the vast Kazakhstan Steppes, nine 16 year-olds prepare to graduate from the Akkol orphanage. Rockets launched overhead from the nearby Cosmodrome inspire their dreams as they write about and perform their imagined future-selves. Guided by the nomadic spirit and natural beauty of the Steppes, the orphans explore questions of time and truth in relation to the challenging reality of their lives. Traditional Kazakh culture, global popular iconography, and space travel are infused throughout their performances and imaginatively used as protective talismans on their journey into an uncertain adulthood.

Entirely comprised both from dissolving still photographs and a simple narrative story line taken verbatim from a newspaper article in the The Arizona Daily Star is I SAW JESUS IN A TORTILLA. It recounts the story of Ramona Barraras, a New Mexican woman, who saw the face of Jesus while rolling her husband's burrito. In an attempt to manipulate the media to her advantage in publicizing this miraculous event, the media ultimately exploited one of the most significant events of Mrs. Barraras' life.