. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

April 14-Deborah Stratman: The Illinois Parables

Posted by | Ziva Schatz | Posted on | April 8, 2016

Thursday, April 14 | Join us for Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman for a screening and discussion!

Deborah Stratman, still from The Illinois Parables, 2016.

Deborah Stratman, still from The Illinois Parables, 2016.

For the last 25 years, has explored the landscape of our national history and psyche in riveting films, sculpture, sound, and public works. With the Illinois Parables, she turns her attention to the “American microcosm” and its storied past. Bracketed by sweeping aerial shots of the state’s ancient prairies and waterways, Stratman spins 11 tales of natural disaster, messianic devotion, technological breakthrough, government resistance, and unsolved mystery. Together, these stories ask how the systems of belief they represent have shaped how we see the land, ourselves, and our nation.

2016, USA, 16mm, 60 min + discussion

Deborah Stratman (Washington DC.) is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker whose work investigates issues of power, control, and belief and explores how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including Museum of Modern Art, NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Mercer Union, Witte de With, the Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Full Frame and Rotterdam. Stratman is the recipient of an Alpert Award, Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, and Wexner Center for the Arts. She teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her BFA from SAIC in 1990 and her MFA from CalArts in 1995.