February 15 – Latham Zearfoss: Home Movies
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | February 9, 2018
Latham Zearfoss, still from Home Movie, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.
Chicago-based artist and organizer Latham Zearfoss (BFA 2008) has built a multifaceted body of work that unites themes of love, community, family, political legacy, personal agency, and collective action. Their poetic and pop-infused videos mine the territory between public and private, reason and emotion, the extraordinary, and the everyday. In HOME MOVIE (2012) cell phone videos of social gatherings and public performances are layered with close-ups of nature, naked bodies, and domestic interiors to form a kaleidoscopic notion of home—as a shared space, a sense of belonging, and a site of intimacy. In extrae (2016) shots of cats, unmade beds, and dried flower petals are paired with an irreverent ode to Tyrone Garner, one of the plaintiffs in the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned archaic sodomy laws throughout the United States. Zearfoss presents a collection of videos spanning the last decade, including the premiere of two new works, Goth Party and White Balance, and restages Something to Move In (2014) and Love Is a Stranger(2012) as live, responsive performances. With Darling Shear, Caroline Campbell, Amalea Tshilds.
2008–18, USA, multiple formats, ca 70 min + discussion
Latham Zearfoss in person
Latham Zearfoss produces time-based images, objects, and experiences about selfhood and otherness. Outside of the studio, they contribute to collective motions toward joy and reflection through social projects such as the queer dance party Chances Dances, Make Yourself Useful, a critical space for White “allyship,” and Open Engagement, an itinerant conference on socially engaged art. Latham holds a BFA from SAIC (2008) and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2011). They have exhibited their work, screened their videos, and DJ’ed internationally and across the United States.
Tags: 2018 > film > Interdisciplinary > Latham Zearfoss > multimedia > Performance > video
Spring 2018!
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | January 19, 2018
Happy new year! We’re thrilled to announce the Spring 2018 season of Conversations at the Edge.
Joan Jonas, still from Stream or River, Flight or Patter, 2016-2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
The series opens February 15 with new and old works by Latham Zearfoss and closes April 19 with an appearance by pioneering multimedia artist Joan Jonas. In between, we’ll be hosting appearances by Ephraim Asili, Lee Anne Schmitt and Jeff Parker, Laura Huertas Millán, Hayoun Kwon,Thorsten Trimpop, curators Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere, and a rare screening of films by the late Edward Owens, introduced by the critic Ed Halter.
Latham Zearfoss, still from Home Movie, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.
Edward Owens, still from Remembrance: A Portrait Study, 1967. Courtesy of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
Tags: 2018 > Astria Suparak > Brett Kashmere > Ed Halter > Edward Owens > Ephraim Asili > Hayoun Kwon > Jeff Parker > Joan Jonas > Latham Zearfoss > Laura Huertas Millan > Lee Anne Schmitt > Thorsten Trimpop
Stay Tuned! Spring 2018
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | January 8, 2018
Happy new year! Conversations at the Edge wraps up another great season.
Check out the Fall 2017 season highlights in photos and stay tuned for when we announce our Spring 2018 lineup!
Jim Trainor, still from The Pink Egg (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
AES+F, still from The Feast of Trimalchio, 2010. Image courtesy of the artists.
Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder. Image courtesy of the artists.
Alex Gerbaulet, still from TIEFENSCHÄRFE (Depth of Field), 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
Ana Mendieta, still from Energy Charge, 1975. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
Sondra Perry, still from IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
On Sondra Perry
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | November 16, 2017
We close this season of Conversations at the Edge with a performance and video by New York-based interdisciplinary artist Sondra Perry whose work critically examines the technologies and power relations that affect representation and black identity.
This week, we welcome School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduate student Lindsay A. Hutchens to reflect upon Sondra Perry’s Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation.
Sondra Perry, still from Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
Sondra Perry’s Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One (2015) begins in the midst of a time-honored tradition: staging a family photograph. The viewer is positioned so that we are across the street looking back at a family in matching black sweats and chroma key green ski masks arranged in front of a home. They look cozy and warm on what would otherwise be a miserable cold and grey day. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” is shouted from the camera, from Perry. Directions to aunts and uncles are given and repeated. “CCCHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSEEEE. CCCHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSEEEE.
CCCHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSEEEE.”
Perry frames this video against a chroma key computer desktop, which she uses to choreograph multiple windows and files of her family and more. While her works have been installed at MoMA PS1 and screened in theater spaces, I have only ever seen Sondra Perry’s Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One, or any of her videos on her website. There, I’ve viewed them by myself, and in a way that mirrors many of the visual systems she references.
Sondra Perry’s work first came into my consciousness thanks to my good friend and curator, Natalie Zelt, who lives in Austin, Texas, but is from Houston where Perry has been a CORE Artist in Residence at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. I regularly make photographic and video work using my own family as subject matter, and Natalie knows this. Coming from what seems to be a much larger family than myself, Perry has fascinated me by drawing attention to the role of photographic mediation in intimate relationships. The camera is the loudest of all participants in the video, highlighted in layered windows, visible access to play buttons and runtimes, audible direction from behind the camera, and its presence repeatedly in the hands of those being recorded. Country also plays a role. Rituals involving the American flag are played out, first subtly and then explicitly. But it is the moments of specificity to Perry’s family that bring us closer, provide access, and establish the stakes. Perry’s grandmother is trying to tell about her process of burying flags too worn to fly, while her mother loudly proclaims “It’s under the collard greens!”
In one early scene, Perry shows her hand as a director. Handing the camera off to a relative, she asks her mother to respond in a certain way to the sweater she is wearing. For a moment, the audience is just as confused as Perry’s mother. She knows the sweater, but is she meant to know the sweater? She’s acting surprised, but is she meant to have expected it? Direction is given from on-camera Perry as well as the male voiced videographer, both telling the mother in so many words, “you do you.” Mom, perform mom. Not mom, but you as a mom. That’s not how you use your hands. Perform yourself, with direction. Act natural. To which Perry’s mother obliges, and ends the scene by reminding, “Well, you are my baby. You can’t take that away from me.”
Perry introduces heavy bass with Venus X’s 2015 track “Beautiful. Gorgeous. Golden. Girl,” leaping generations with music as well as casting. Three young women cheese in selfie mode and dance on the sidewalk, two with long glossy ponytails popping out the top of their chroma key green ski masks. They record themselves in a way no one else has yet. Flipping hair. Giggling. Performing without being directed on-camera. Their youth brings attention to the hyper-visibility of the chroma key green ski masks, and pushes against Perry’s control as maker. These women have literally cut a hole in the masks for their hair to poke through, which Perry combs with care in return.
The final scene shows Perry’s entire family together at the table, poised to peel sweet potatoes or yams, again in matching black sweats and ski masks. Another family tradition, warm and cozy, which makes me almost smell Thanksgiving. Perry asks if her grandmother has chosen a song for everyone to sing while they peel, and eventually accompanied by hand claps, together they sing a gospel about family caring for one another. Another direction is given from Perry to “try and connect with each other, somehow, without talking.” Nearly to the end, Perry’s grandmother is seen at the table, having finished with peeling, attempting to remove her mask. She has a ponytail of her own, greyed and in curly tendrils but just as playful as the three young women, and Perry’s mother along with a masked female relation reach over to help so as not to mess the matriarch’s hair.
Perry’s Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One embraces conversations about agency and representation in lens-based work, as well as the ways traditions and ritual are passed down through family But it’s through these in-between acts of care and affection–ponytails being guided in and out of ski masks–which Perry seems to have picked up on in the moment, in the middle of construction and long after suggestion of non-verbal intimacy, that do something more for me. They remind me of sitting in front of my grandmother’s chaise lounge so she could brush my hair while we watched The Golden Girls together. That is the thing that pricks me—these moments in which media is entwined with care.
Tags: Black identity > computer simulation > Family > family archive > Interdisciplinary > Lindsay A. Hutchens > multimedia > Sondra Perry > Technology > video
November 16 – Sondra Perry: Performance and Video
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | November 10, 2017
Sondra Perry, still from Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
Mixing personal history and pop culture, New York-based artist Sondra Perry savvily dissects power relations that shape Black identity and representation. Her performances and multimedia works use video games, glitchy 3D avatars, and computer desktop windows to express and explode biases built into the code of everyday life. In the video-performance Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One (2015-17), she layers footage of family members acting out real and fabricated familial lore, inviting audiences to consider the shifting and mutable threads of identity in the digital age. While, in IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection (2017), she focuses on her brother—who, as an NCAA college basketball player had his likeness used without compensation in popular video games—and contemplates the ways images of Black men and women have long been exploited for profit and prestige.
2015-17, USA, live performance and digital file, ca 65 min + discussion
Sondra Perry in person
Sondra Perry (b. New Jersey) is an interdisciplinary artist whose videos and performances foreground the tools of digital production as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and to remobilize their potential. Perry has had multiple solo exhibitions, including at THE KITCHEN, for her work Resident Evil. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Perry was recently awarded the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize for a solo show at the Seattle Art Museum. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, the Experimental Television Center, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as a CORE artist-in-residence. She received her MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Alfred University.
Tags: 3D > Black identity > computer simulation > Family > family archive > Interdisciplinary > multimedia > Sondra Perry > Technology
On Ana Mendieta
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | November 8, 2017
This week, we are thrilled to present a selection of experimental short films by the late Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist Ana Mendieta.
Ana Mendieta, still from Volcán, 1979. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
Born in Havana, Cuba, Ana Mendieta grew up amidst the political upheaval of Castro’s regime, fleeing to the United States with her older sister Raquelin in 1961. She would later go on to forge a prolific career creating groundbreaking work which spanned across multiple mediums. Mendieta’s radical practice included photography, performance, drawing, sculpture, site-specific installations, and hundreds of recently highlighted short films.
Haunting yet powerful in their silence, Mendieta’s films address themes of violence, transformation, resilience, and collective passivity. A majority of the films presented in this week’s screening were shot using celluloid film, allowing Mendieta to physically manipulate the medium to create ethereal effects. Through both the presence and absence of the body, the films confront the viewer with the visceral corporeality of her performances and actions.
Ana Mendieta, still from Butterfly, 1975. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
In the following excerpt, Sheila Dickinson discusses Mendieta’s films as presented in the 2015 exhibition Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery (University of Minnesota, Regis Center for Art).
Ana Mendieta Comes Alive in Her Films
Sheila Dickinson
MINNEAPOLIS — The more time I spent in the galleries of Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, the more I felt the lived presence of the artist herself. Unlike the bright white cube of a typical gallery, here the viewer is invited to walk through a filmy white curtain and enter a darkened, sanctified space. The artist appears only occasionally in her films, but she haunts them with her body forms found in earth, fire, blood, and water. Projected directly onto the walls of the gallery, up to three per wall, the films interact and converse with each other as they begin and end asynchronously. A hushed silence permeates the darkness as Mendieta, or her body form, shape shifts upon the walls. The films are an activating presence, bringing to the viewer an aliveness that cannot be found in her still photography. Much of that photography, and her films, has until now been understood as documentation; this exhibition demonstrates that Mendieta thought and created through films as much as through the performances and sculptures shown in them.
Read the full article here.
Ana Mendieta, still from Energy Charge, 1975. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
Tags: Ana Mendieta > body > displacement > earthworks > Experimental Film > Installation > Performance > Rachel Weiss > Raquel Cecilia Mendieta > Sheila Dickinson > short film
November 9 – The Films of Ana Mendieta
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | November 3, 2017
Ana Mendieta, still from Butterfly, 1975. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
The late Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta forged a radical practice that explored primal themes of displacement, the body, violence, and transformation. Known mostly for her earthworks, photographs, and performances, Mendieta also created numerous short films. With these works, she both captured her ephemeral performances and further transformed them through trick photography, staging, or video synthesis. In Silueta Sangrienta (1975) the artist’s body is suddenly replaced with a pool of blood; in Butterfly (1975) the artist’s body morphs and pulsates with the electrons of a video monitor. Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, film archivist for The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, presents a selection of these films, many which have been recently rediscovered and restored. The program will be followed by a discussion with Cecilia and scholar Rachel Weiss.
1971-81, USA, digital file, ca 60 min + discussion
Scholar Rachel Weiss and The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection film archivist Raquel Cecilia in person
Ana Mendieta (b. 1948, Havana, Cuba–1985, New York) created groundbreaking work in photography, performance, film, video, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Mendieta’s work has been the subject of six major museum retrospectives, the most recent of which, Ana Mendieta: Traces, was organized by the Hayward Gallery, England, in 2013, and travelled to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, and the Galerie Rudolfinum, Czech Republic. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985 was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, in 2005 and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and Miami Art Museum, Florida.
Tags: Ana Mendieta > body > displacement > earthworks > Experimental Film > Installation > Performance > Rachel Weiss > Raquel Cecilia Mendieta > short film
On Alex Gerbaulet
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | November 2, 2017
Alexandra Gerbaulet, still from SCHICHT (Shift), 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
This week we are excited to welcome German artist and filmmaker Alex Gerbaulet to Conversations at the Edge for a screening of her experimental documentaries.
Bridging the gap between analysis and poetry, Gerbaulet’s films confront problematic histories and the complex narratives hidden within personally and collectively repressed memory.
Included in this screening is Gerbaulet’s 2015 film, Schicht (Shift). Part autobiographical and part critical observation, the film juxtaposes the artist’s personal archive of family photographs and her mother’s diary excerpts with found footage and historical images. What results is a metaphorical parallel that Gerbaulet draws between her own familial history with that of her birthplace and hometown, Salzgitter, Germany.
Visit the film’s website here for additional texts and reviews.
Alex Gerbaulet, still from SCHICHT (Shift), 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
November 2 – Alex Gerbaulet: Digging Deep
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | October 27, 2017
Alexa Gerbaulet, still from SCHICHT (Shift), 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
Alluring and enigmatic, the films of German artist Alex Gerbaulet unearth the complex narratives hidden within personally and collectively repressed memory. Utilizing both archival material and footage filmed by the artist herself, Gerbaulet’s documentaries bridge the gap between analysis and poetry. Buildings, space, and the body serve as sites that bear witness to past crime and trauma. Questioning voiceovers dissolve the idyllic facades of these structures, as her films examine the consequences of passively forgetting. Through political and biographical frameworks, Gerbaulet quietly confronts the lingering vestiges of a problematic history. The program features Gerbaulet’s recent films Schicht (2015) and Depth of Field (2017), followed by Tattooed Prisoners (2007) and Datterode (2005).
Presented in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Chicago.
2005-17, Germany, multiple formats, ca 65 min + discussion
Alex Gerbaulet in person
Alex Gerbaulet (b. Salzgitter, Germany) is a German artist, filmmaker, and curator who studied Philosophy, Media Science, and Visual Arts in Brunswick and Vienna. She is the recipient of a 2008 scholarship by Hans-Bockler-Stiftung, a 2012 scholarship by the city of Berlin, and a 2014 grant from Art- und Culture-Foundation Stade (Germany). In 2011, Gerbaulet was selected for Berlinale Talent Campus DOK Station. Since 2014, she has worked as a producer for Pong Film GmbH in Berlin where she currently resides.
On Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder
Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | October 26, 2017
New York-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder return to Chicago with a new film performance, in collaboration with sound artist Brian Case for this week’s Conversations at the Edge.
View the following teaser to get a sense of how these collaborators physically transform reels of film into sculptural and kinetic abstractions of light.
Tags: expanded cinema > experimental cinema > Experimental Film > Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
