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Website and Blog of Videographer Sylvia Toy, a/k/a San Francisco-based Solo Performer Nena St. Louis
Publish Date : 1/12/2008 6:48:00 AM   Source : Application Development News

What: website and blog of videographer Sylvia Toy
When: Online since November 2007
Where: http://www.sylviatoyindustries.com
http://sylviatoyindustries.blogspot.com/
Nena St. Louis first began writing plays after her novel was rejected by 65 agents. Since she'd invested so much time in studying dramatic writing and solo performance was all the rage in her hometown of San Francisco, she took her writing to the stage. Strange as it may be, Ms. St. Louis is increasingly speechless, and has found more to say in "video performance art nano-movies" than on page or stage.

This is ironic because Nena St. Louis has been known as a writer/performer for almost 20 years (www.nena-stlouis.com/performances/index.html):

"Nena St. Louis' ... DO YOU WANT TO BUY MY BRAIN? was a frequently hilarious, often touching portrait of a woman with a personality disorder, her psychiatrist, and her invasive 'other' personality, called Susan. St. Louis negotiated this territory carefully and skillfully, and the segment in which she used a New York City subway as a chance to relieve the screaming anxiety in her head was explosively funny. Not only did she make the character accessible, she also added a special sheen of don't-mess-with-me spirit that both dignified the woman's difficult life and revealed her humanity." -- Mari Coates, SF Weekly

"Do You Want To Buy My Brain?," 1995, was St. Louis' second solo performance play about Susan, auditory hallucination. Her first, "Finding the Golden Thread," was the story of growing up with a voice who St. Louis began hearing when she was 8 years old. St. Louis had not yet been diagnosed when she first began writing about Susan.

St. Louis feels she has been able to continue to grow as an artist since being prescribed Depakote in 1998. However, she feels there was a certain visceralness in the work around her struggles with Susan that became lacking after St. Louis entered treatment in 1993. She has discovered it to be impossible to keep that visceral quality out of her videography. St. Louis passed deviantArt.com's curatorial screening for film and video artists, within whose community of artists in every media and genre, she has a very, very, long way to go to be too visceral.

For two years, St. Louis has carried two cameras in her handbag, usually one of which is a camcorder, in order to "document and collect the flotsam of angst that collects on the pavement, walls, windows and even mailboxes of the city." According to St. Louis, this flotsam is the "lint in the folds of the brain."

St. Louis averages two to three videos per month. Her website is sylviatoyindustries.com and her blog, sylviatoyindustries.blogspot.com. Check revver.com for previews of her newer work.