Jason Simon
Vera
Video, 25 minutes, 2006

Vera is an assisted self-portrait of consumption. The subject is a woman whose passions and compulsions are of spending and loss, taste and subjectivity. The video consists entirely of an interview in which Simon’s questions are first audible, then excised, and Vera herself never leaves the screen. Along with Production Notes: Fast Food for Thought (1987) and Paul Schrader’s Bag (1994–2004), Simon’s work investigates relationships between consumption and our shared formations of the self.

Jason Simon is an artist and film and video maker based in New York City. He is a founding member of the cooperative gallery Orchard and an associate professor of cinema at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He has shown his work in the Whitney Biennial and in solo gallery shows at Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts Co., and his writing has appeared in journals such as Parkett, Purple, Springerin, and Frieze. His films and videos are distributed by The Video Data Bank, First Run/Icarus Films, and some of his projects deal with advertising, art restoration, public address systems, and collecting. He is the recipient of grants from Art Matters Inc., The Polaroid Foundation, The Washington State Arts Council, and The New York Foundation for the Arts. He worked with Bill Horrigan at the Wexner Center for the Arts establishing the Wexner’s Art & Technology lab, and has curated film and video programs in New York and abroad. Each summer he hosts the one-day, one-minute film and video festival in a barn in upstate New York with his partner Moyra Davey. Vera premiered at Orchard and in the exhibition “Capital (it fails now)” in 2006.