New York: GeneFree Video Performance Art

Marcy B. Freedman respects the fact that New York City galleries charge two hundred dollars each for her solo performance DVDs. There is no market for thousands of art videos so each limited edition video must sell for a high price. She remembers a gallery offering a Bill Viola DVD at $75,000, and that may NOT be the highest price out there! Matthew Barney creates special sculptural cases to contain his limited edition DVDs. None of this would be reasonable if the videos were already available for free on YouTube or Vimeo! Marcy has usually kept her my own solo performance videos off of the internet. But for their GENEFREE work--" Gene just likes to get the work out there! A noble sentiment, indeed...The artists of GeneFree bring video art to the world," Marcy B. Freedman.

Gene Panczenko (www.projectionarts.com) describes his collaboration with Marcy B. Freedman during 8 years of working together on the production of public video-performance projects --"Marcy and I complement each other very well. She is the emotion, and I am the logic and reason. She is the extrovert and I am the introvert. She challenges me with new concepts and ways of implementing them technically. I'm the tech guy and the gadget guru. I do much of the shooting and editing. I compose and play the soundtracks to our videos. I build sets and props. Each of us has come up with the seeds of an idea. We bounce them off each, never holding back or afraid of criticism, until we come up with something that works. Our work together has evolved, and each of us looks forward to coming up with something completely different each time."

Many of the GeneFree video-performance exhibitions involve audience participation that can't be duplicated. Some of free public screenings were designed to provide a viewing experience that was special. For example, OUT OF SYNC and GenderBenders were projected at a very large scale, ten feet tall, onto buildings. VIDEO BALLS consisted of three videos projected onto large weather balloons. A *Ghost Never Dies* was also projected large onto a screen in a very specific site of relevance to the video content. Online viewing does NOT re-create the original experience for many of the GeneFree projects.

View \"Out of Synch\" on YouTube reformatted to one viewing screen.

Although GeneFree doesn't like showing a video collaboration over and over, they submitted their piece OUT OF SYNC to a juried show in Connecticut and were award third place by juror, Thom Collins, then Director of the Neuberger Museum and now Director of the Miami Art Museum. It was shown at the Silvermine Art Guild in Connecticut on two flat screen monitors.

Find more GeneFree by going to the Projectionarts channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/projectionarts

Email Marcy B. Freedman at: mbf@bestweb.net