Catalogue > At random

"Catalogue" is a series of 16mm films and videos that consider the time it takes to look at the objects for sale in a mainstream furniture catalogue of designer knock-offs. The catalogue presents de-saturated photographs of staged rooms shot and printed to resemble sets for film-noir era movies. This mediation hypothetically increases the objects` desirability by picturing them in a nostalgic historical moment that is, in fact, fictional. In these pictures, copies of designer furniture are indistinguishable from original pieces. The film is a documentary of the filmmaker’s looking; each cut was determined by the rise and decay of her interest in the object. Each film takes one volume of the 11-volume mail order catalogue as its subject. They can be screened as a set or individually. "Catalogue Vol.6" was shot with audio clips from a horror movie that mention the words "house," or particular rooms or parts of a house, playing in the studio while the film was being shot so that each shot acquired a random "soundtrack." Then the film clips were organized as a "tour" through the rooms of a house: foyer, living room, dining room, kitchen, study, bath, ending at the bedroom.

Dana Berman Duff’s artworks are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Phillips Collection (Washington DC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), The Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh), and a number of private collections. Her works in small format film and video have been screened in a number of festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Geneva), Edinburgh International Film Festival, ExIS (Seoul), Antimatter (Vancouver), San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads, Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque), Cairo International Film Festival, Timisoara Festival (Romania), Filmmakers Festival (Milan), Onion City Experimental Film Festival (Chicago), LaborBerlin microcinema (Berlin), Dortmund/Cologne International Women’s Film Festival, Seattle Filmforum, Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles). The Gringas, (2013) was named Best Documentary Feature at the 2014 Mexico International Film Festival. Dana Berman Duff teaches at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and lives part-time in Mexico.