Michael Robinson
Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant.
A password-protected love affair, a little vapor on Venus, and a horse with no name ride out in search of a better world. Against the mounting darkness, a willing abduction offers a stab at tomorrow.
A modern prophet’s visions of mythical destruction and transformation are recounted across a turbulent geometric ceremony of rising curtains, swirling set pieces and unveiled idols from music television’s past. Together, these parallel cults of revelation unlock a pathway to the far side of the sun.
Culled from segments of the Miss USA pageants of the late 1980s, Robinson’s silent two-channel video, 'Desert States (You Win Again)', reduces and refracts the source’s highly-gendered pageantry to its rawest form of ceremonial spectacle.
The cabin is on fire! Krystle can't stop crying, Alexis won't stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again.
In the near future, amidst the aftermath of civil war, a band of female prisoners ambles across an otherwordly coastal exile, supervised and sorted by a group of idle soldiers. Rummaging, stuttering, and smashing through the leftovers of American culture, these ragged souls conjure an unstable magic, fueled by their own apathy and the poisonous histories imbedded in their unearthed junk. Suspicion, boredom, garbage, and glamor conspire in the languid pageantry of ruin. Feel the breeze in your hair, and the world crumbling through your fingers.
Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.
This is the new choreography of devotion, via the vlog of southern nightmares. This is the light that never goes out. This is the line describing your mom.
A dark wave of exile, incest, and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Three star-crossed siblings wander in search of one another as a storm of purple prose and easy listening slowly engulfs them.
Made for the 2009 PDX Film Festival "Karaoke Throwdown" in Portland, OR.
A charred visitation with an icy language of control: "there is no room for love". Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist remake/drag-show circa 1992.
Plagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.
A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.
Dormant sites of past World's Fairs breed an erruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever even cold November rain.
An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading deception and myth along its murky path, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit.
Shaping a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the film draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.
Viewed at its seams, a National Geographic slideshow from the 1960s and '70s deforms into a bright white distress signal.
Commissioned by Matador Records for the release of Interpol's 2004 LP "Antics", and presented at "Interpol Spaces" gallery events in London (The Ragged School), Berlin (Galerie Tristesse), Paris (Agnès B. Gallery), New York (199 Lafayette Street) and Los Angeles (Subliminal Projects Space).
Twin attempts at structuring images of home and loved-ones collapse in the face of the romantic.
A collection of discarded souls, rescued from the trash of a college darkroom.
//\///\////\ contemplates the same-day deaths of Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and John F. Kennedy (all deceased on 11/22/1963) through the voices of the their respective wives (Laura Huxley, Joy Davidman and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). This meditation on visionary states of being unfolds across three sites of radical ambition: a failed desert commune, the ruins of a secret fascist compound and an empty glass cathedral. Part of the ongoing collaborative project by Phillip Andrew Lewis and Michael Robinson, Our Hyddeous Strenkth.
