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Leslie
Raymond
(b. 1968) is a video artist living
in San Antonio, Texas. Her solo and collaborative films and videos have been presented at festivals including the 50th Sydney Film Festival (Australia) dLux Media Arts "Future Perfect" screening, the Lausanne Underground Film & Video Festival (Switzerland), Loop Barcelona (Spain), and the Museo de Arte Contemprareano (Argentina) in which her work was awarded first place in video installation.
As vjFutureWorkerGirl, Raymond has mixed video live with experimental musicians and DJs at festivals and venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 21 Grand (Oakland), the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, and the Soap Factory (Minneapolis).
She and her partner Jason Jay Stevens are known as Potter-Belmar Labs, a collaborative team who have been working together in multimedia performance and installation since 1999.
Born in Saint Paul and raised in Detroit, Raymond received her BFA in film and video from Rhode Island School of Design in 1990, and an MFA from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design in 1999. She currently teaches at The University of Texas at San Antonio where she started the New Media Studio Program in the Department of Art & Art History.
bio #2
Leslie Raymond does not use recipes. All of her efforts are experiments. She approaches a selection of disparate ingredients with the spirit of a pioneer and an inventor. She is an artist without limitations of medium. Those extracategorical spaces are her territory, bringing together material and data--and often other artists--from far reaches and allowing a culture of relationships to grow. She creates art this way, and she generates grand spectacles this way. Leslie Raymond is, herself, one of these experiments, with a line of Russian Jewish heritage in one direction, and Chinese Taoist off in another. Her father is an architect; her mother is a potter. Where these strands come together is where Leslie Raymond begins, experimenting with process, texture, taste, and presentation.
Leslie Raymond
Artist Statement
The moving image is at the core of my work. I both shoot and borrow images, then digitally process them in preparation for live cinema performance, as stand-alone video loops for display, for projection into/onto installations and specific sites, and as still images for print.
Nature, technology, and social systems are prevalent themes in my images, presented with as much attention to the aesthetics of the imagery as possible. The seductive beauty of celluloid film drew me to work with the moving image more than twenty years ago, and in keeping with the technological changes inevitable over time I eventually moved from 8mm and16mm film to digital video. Reconciling the major difference in image quality between the two media has certainly inspired my deep attention to developing the visual characteristics of my imagery.
I tread a fertile terrain between the cinema and the art world. I am captivated by all of the genres of film-- art house, avant garde, film noir, hollywood, kung-fu, new wave, online, underground, and so-on. The histories and practices of both experimental cinema and video art are equally fascinating to me, particularly in their correlation to social, economic, technological, and cultural developments. Especially intriguing is the sub-plot concerning their developments within the commercial vs. non-commercial sectors, and the socio-political and economic implications therein.
Above all, I am an artist working in contemporary media who is heavily grounded in the processes and dialogue of traditional fine arts practice, while striving continuously to confront the present moment and its implications for the future. I do my best to amplify positivity-- both in my artwork and in my life.