Fighting Kissing Dancing: Video Art at the Fabric Workshop and Museum

A Loose Theme for a Diverse Group of Video Works

The title Fighting Kissing Dancing immediately creates expectations. These are actions deeply embedded in the language of cinema. A fight can establish conflict, a kiss can signal intimacy, and a dance can communicate attraction, freedom, celebration, or tension without requiring much dialogue.

But not every work in the exhibition actually depended on those actions. Swimming, running, getting dressed, and other everyday physical activities appeared alongside the more conventional cinematic gestures.

That made the exhibition difficult to read as a single argument. Rather than developing a sustained conversation around narrative, the show worked better when considered as a collection of individual experiments with video, sound, movement, and the human body.

In other words, the strongest moments came when the artists stopped worrying about the exhibition's theme and started questioning what video itself could do.

Martin Murphy's Film Spills

The most compelling work in the exhibition was Martin Murphy's Film Spills, a short video that turns the screen itself into the subject.

Murphy begins with an unusual visual device: what appears to be liquid video is released onto the screen in small pools. The glistening shapes distort and contain fragments of familiar commercial-film imagery.

Hollywood's visual language is still recognizable, but it has been stripped of some of its narrative authority. Explosions, actors, dialogue, music, and cinematic spectacle become raw material.

The movie stops behaving like a movie. The screen becomes a surface, and the image becomes material.

This is where Film Spills becomes particularly interesting. Instead of asking viewers to become absorbed in a fictional world, Murphy draws attention to the physical qualities of the image itself.

When the Screen Becomes Material

Traditional cinema generally tries to make the screen disappear. The better the illusion, the less conscious the viewer becomes of the frame, projection, editing, and technical apparatus behind the image.

Murphy moves in the opposite direction.

The work makes the viewer conscious of the screen as a flat surface capable of holding light, color, sound, and movement.

The result connects Film Spills with the history of experimental and structural approaches to cinema, while using contemporary digital techniques rather than traditional film materials.

There is also a satisfying contradiction at work. Murphy uses fragments of commercial cinema—the very kind of illusion-driven filmmaking that experimental structural cinema historically challenged—and turns those fragments against themselves.

The familiar spectacle remains, but it is no longer allowed to function normally.

Sound Adds Another Layer of Chaos

The experiment is not limited to the image. Sound becomes equally important.

Music, dialogue, and effects designed for the immersive environment of commercial cinema begin to collide. Instead of supporting a coherent narrative, they overlap and interfere with one another.

By the end, the video approaches the sensation of standing in front of a wall of televisions in an electronics store: multiple images, competing sounds, flashing colors, and too much information arriving simultaneously.

It is cinematic overload—but also a reminder that cinema is built from separate components that can be pulled apart and rearranged.

Jillian Mayer's Scenic Jogging

Jillian Mayer's Scenic Jogging takes a completely different approach while arriving at a surprisingly related question.

A woman runs through the streets of Miami while chasing projected images resembling the generic computer screensavers that once came pre-installed on desktop computers.

Those images were designed to represent an uncomplicated form of escape: peaceful landscapes, perfect colors, and artificial environments without any of the inconvenience of ordinary life.

Mayer places that artificial perfection directly onto the real city.

The runner follows the projected images with extraordinary determination. She does not casually admire them. She chases them.

Chasing the Perfect Image

The simplicity of Scenic Jogging gives it much of its strength.

There is almost no conventional exposition. We are given a woman, a city, projected landscapes, and the strange determination that keeps her running.

Yet those minimal ingredients are enough to produce a narrative.

Who is she? Where is she going? Why does she need to catch the image? What happens when she finally reaches it?

The video never needs to answer these questions. The mystery itself supplies the story.

Real Streets, Artificial Landscapes

Mayer's work also shares an important concern with Murphy's Film Spills: the relationship between an image and the surface carrying it.

In Film Spills, the screen becomes almost physical. In Scenic Jogging, projected images are placed directly onto the physical landscape of Miami.

The city becomes a kind of screen.

Streets, buildings, pedestrians, and darkness become part of the projection. Occasionally another person walks through the image, creating an accidental interaction between the planned video and the unpredictable reality surrounding it.

That tension gives the work its energy. The artificial landscape promises perfection, while the real city constantly interrupts it.

Where the Exhibition Loses Focus

The strongest works in Fighting Kissing Dancing raise interesting questions about the medium of video. Unfortunately, the exhibition as a whole does not always sustain that level of engagement.

The problem is not necessarily the individual works. It is the curatorial framework connecting them.

A title can do more than identify an exhibition. It can establish a way of looking at everything that follows. Once visitors are told to think about fighting, kissing, dancing, intimacy, and narrative, they naturally begin searching for those connections.

When the works do not consistently develop those ideas, the framework starts to feel less like a productive question and more like a loose justification for bringing unrelated videos together.

The exhibition's best ideas therefore come from its strongest individual works rather than from its overarching theme.

What the Best Works Have in Common

Despite their differences, Film Spills and Scenic Jogging share a fascinating characteristic: both make the viewer aware of the relationship between image, surface, and physical space.

Both works take something familiar and make it strange. One dismantles the conventions of commercial cinema; the other takes the harmless computer screensaver and turns it into the object of an obsessive physical pursuit.

Video Art Beyond Narrative

Ultimately, Fighting Kissing Dancing is most successful when it treats video as more than a container for stories.

The exhibition demonstrates how contemporary video artists can manipulate projection, sound, movement, editing, and physical space to create experiences that traditional narrative filmmaking cannot easily reproduce.

The most memorable works do not simply tell us something. They make us notice the machinery through which images become meaningful.

That is why Murphy's collapsing cinematic images and Mayer's impossible chase through Miami remain the most convincing parts of the exhibition. Both artists take a familiar visual language and push it just far enough out of alignment to make us look at it again.

Fighting Kissing Dancing: Exhibition Details

A Strong Pair of Video Experiments Inside an Uneven Exhibition

Fighting Kissing Dancing may not fully succeed as a tightly unified thematic exhibition, but that does not make it uninteresting.

Its strongest contributions are precisely the works that refuse to behave like conventional cinema. Martin Murphy turns the movie screen into a physical surface, while Jillian Mayer takes an artificial digital landscape and projects it into the unpredictable streets of Miami.

Together, they demonstrate the potential of experimental video art: images can become objects, screens can become landscapes, and ordinary digital experiences can become strange physical performances.

The exhibition's title promises fighting, kissing, and dancing. Its most interesting moments, however, happen somewhere else—in the space between image and reality, narrative and abstraction, screen and world.