Venetia Kapernekas Gallery is pleased to present Margo Victor’s film The Rotten Riotous West, starring Jenny Schimizu.

The Rotten Riotous West is an experimental film, which celebrates the alternative, with regard to the position of power that women must create within our society, via the lexicon of the Western film genre. Historically the Western has been a favorite playground of filmmakers to explore issues of the marginalized vs. the accepted, the powerful vs. the disenfranchised, women vs. men, white vs. brown, etc. Victor’s minimal, formal approach to the medium from a contemporary artist’s point of view liberates the genre of dialogue and replaces it with pre-recorded library sounds, painstakingly cut and pasted into place for just the right level of hyper-reality tempered by Spaghetti western-esque incongruence. With the focus dedicated to one actor, Victor disperses with the narrative task of resolving conflict between characters and elevates the scenario to an articulation of the conflict of the existence of alternative subjectivities within a traditional world.

Margo Victor lives and works in Los Angeles, California, and received her BFA at the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; as well as group shows in Los Angeles and New York. In 2006 Victor was invited to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art & Tech program to complete her film The Rotten Riotous West, 2006 which debuted in Europe at Open Space, Cologne, April 2007. Venetia Kapernekas Gallery hosted Victor’s first New York solo show, Space Oddity in 2007. Victor recently exhibited in the group show, Data Cowboy, curated by Julia Fryett at the Core Club in New York, and a mural project, Bending the Notes, at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. She is active as a curator, musician, and performer in Los Angeles.

Jenny Shimizu is a motorcycle mechanic, super-model discovered by Calvin Klein, underground personality, and protagonist in The Rotten Riotous West.