Summertime Is Show Time For This UA Festival Of The Small Screen. By Margaret Regan IT'S A CONTRADICTION in terms for an avant-garde event to become an institution, but that's the uneasy status of VideoTENSIONS. The free summertime video series at the UA begins its fifth season on Thursday, June 6. Five years is a ripe age on the usually ephemeral arts scene. Later in the summer, there will be a retrospective of favorite videos from seasons past. Four prominent video artists will travel here to lecture on their works. But these signs of success hardly mean that curator Vikki Dempsey has decided to go establaishment. Consider the title she's given to this evening's set of three videos: VideoGRRLS, with an emphasis on grrr. The show opens with Girl Power (Part 1) by 22-year-old Chicago videomaker Sadie Benning. Girl Power, says Dempsey, is "a raucous vision of what it means to be a radical girl in the '90s." Benning's work will be followed by Jennifer Reeder's Clit-o-Matic: Adventures of White Trash Girl and Leah Gilliam's Sapphire and the Slave Girl. "It's a fun show," Dempsey says of VideoGRRLS. "It's the new wave in video. Young women are the least represented group, though women do tend to pick up video cameras. It should be empowering and fun. These women are not subscribing to any norms at all. White Trash Girl could be highly offensive." While "highly offensive" is not usually high on the list of descriptions promoters give to their events, it's a clue to what VideoTENSIONS is meant to be. Dempsey, an MFA candidate in the university's New Genre program, started the series to show progressive, cutting-edge work in the burgeoning field of video. All the better, she says, if the videos have a strong political point of view or deal with pressing social issues. Besides raucous and radical girls, other topics this season include gay and Latina issues, child abuse and coming of age. Each year Dempsey selects an organizing topic and this year decided on experimental videos by, for and about young people. "It's something very prominent now, for high schools to provide video equipment to young people, especially in New York and Los Angeles. Palo Verde High School, Tucson High and a few others locally have programs. I see kids getting more interested in video and departing from what they'd see on TV in their work. In fact, they're critiquing TV." Dempsey is giving local young people a chance to show their works with the annual VideoLOCAL contest. Deadline for entries is July 5. Students in local high school media programs are encouraged to submit work. Here's the schedule of videos. • June 6: VideoGRRLS. • June 13: VideoLATINA. Visiting Los Angeles artists Gina Lamb, Marisela Gomez and Alma Lopez screen a compilation of their work, including "The Missing Latina," about the absence of minorities on commercial television. • June 20: VideoQUEER. An evening of video art and documentaries by and about gays and lesbians will include a "gay youth tape." June 27: VideoDADDY. Visiting artist Mark Taylor of San Francisco shows his video "My Daddy and Animal Daddies" along with other works about violence toward children. July 4: VideoGLORY. An Independence Day showing of works about independence and coming of age. July 11: VideoREPLAY. The best of VideoTENSIONS first four years, selected by vote of the viewers. July 18: VideoLOCAL. A showing of local works selected by Dempsey. VideoTENSIONS runs for seven consecutive Thursday evenings, from June 6 though July 18, including July 4. The free programs begin at 7:30 p.m. in the UA Modern Languages Building auditorium, Room 350. For more information call 621-7352.

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