Curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Jon Raymond.
As Julia Bryan-Wilson recalls: “‘Weiden [sp] and Kennedy Talent Showcase,’ as this screening is listed on Miranda’s CV on the 1997 Regional Arts and Cultural Council Project Grant Application, was the sarcastic name my friend Jon Raymond and I gave to the video show we curated at the Candyass record label warehouse. This is where I met Miranda July. She came to the opening and we began working on Big Miss Moviola together later that summer.
The title of the show was a joke about how self-promotional the local advertising company Wieden+Kennedy was when by contrast the videos we were showing, entirely made by our friends, were scrappy and unpolished and weird. I was a temp at Wieden+Kennedy and held the entire operation in high contempt. In other words, W+K had nothing to do with it whatsoever; I think we misspelled the first name on purpose but we might genuinely not have known how to spell it. Miranda came to pass out Big Miss Moviola fliers and also brought some videos with her, which we decided to throw in the mix at the last minute; hence she has listed it as a Big Miss Moviola screening. The whole thing was fairly impromptu in terms of what was actually showing on the video monitors; however, Jon and I did make a painstaking and careful little exhibition catalog, complete with original essays written by us and descriptions and stills of some of the videos. Our friends at Kinko’s helped us color xerox the whole thing for free. Later, I decided the jokey name of the exhibition was too silly for my CV, and changed it after the fact to ‘There is a Charge.’ We kind of played fast and loose with titles and such at that time.”