Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S.
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 7, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 6pm | Curator Chris Hill in person!
- People’s Communications Network, Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison (1973). Image courtesy of the Video Data Bank.
In 1995, the Video Data Bank published “Surveying the First Decade,” a massive, 16-hour anthology of nearly 70 titles from artists and media-makerswho defined the first decade of video art. Curated by Chris Hill, then curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the anthology is widely acclaimed for an expansive and revelatory vision that positions works by grassroots activists alongside those by established artists. This evening, to celebrate the VDB’s re-release of “Survey” on DVD, Hill illuminates the medium’s roots in the tumultuous artistic, cultural, and political practices of the 1970s and her efforts to capture the scene twenty years later. The program includes rare public screenings of the collection’s most revealing videos, including: Switch! Monitor! Drift! (Steina Vasulka, 1976); Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison (People’s Communications Network, 1973); Boomerang (Richard Serra & Nancy Holt, 1974); The Red Tapes, Part II (Vito Acconci, 1976). Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. TRT: ca 75 min.
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Boomerang
Richard Serra with Nancy Holt, US, 1974, Beta SP video, 11 min., excerpt
This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. The language of Boomerang, and the relation between the description and what is being described, is not arbitrary. Language and image are being formed and revealed as they are organized. (VDB)
Switch! Monitor! Drift!
Steina Vasulka, US, 1976, Beta SP video 4 min.
Switch! Monitor! Drift! is one of a series of “machine visions” constructed by Steina in the ’70s. In this documentation of a studio landscape, two cameras’ signals are combined through a luminance keyer. One camera is mounted on a turntable; the second camera is pointed at the first. The image from the stationary camera is time-base adjusted so that it appears to drift horizontally across the monitor, exposing the horizontal framing interval, a black (low voltage) area that is normally hidden from view. The signal of the revolving camera is keyed into this area. The revolving second camera continuously pans the studio, occasionally revealing Steina walking around and flipping a directional switch at the turntable. As the tape progresses the luminance key is adjusted to include a broader tonal range through which the signal from the revolving camera is increasingly visible. (VDB)
The Red Tapes Part II
Vito Acconci, US, 1976, Beta SP video, 60 min., excerpt
The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a “topography of the self,” constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space. The production of The Red Tapes involved painters and filmmakers Erika Beckman, Ilona Granet, Richie O’Halloran, Kathy Rusch, David Salle, and Michael Zwack. (VDB)
Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison
People’s Communications Network, US, 1973, Beta SP video, 18 min., excerpt
Two years after the riots and deaths at Attica, New York, a community day was organized at Greenhaven, a federal prison in Connecticut. Think Tank, a prisoners’ group, coordinated efforts with African-American community members outside the prison walls to fight racism and poverty. The event was documented by People’s Communication Network, a community video group founded by Bill Stephens, for cablecast in New York City, marking the first time an alternative video collective was allowed to document an event inside prison walls. Seventy-five-year-old Queen Mother Moore speaks of her support of Marcus Garvey in New Orleans and her involvement with African-American education in Brooklyn. Her powerful delivery of lessons in black history, first-person accounts of resistance in the South, and finally her own a cappella performance of “This country ’tis to me, a land of misery…,” is a testament to the importance of people using media to document their own communities and tell their own histories. This tape was found in the Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio) Free Library, a media access resource project organized in late 1966 by students interested in networking with social movements and media activists around the country. (VDB)
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Chris Hill is a media curator and educator. She served on the Media Arts faculty at Antioch College from 1997 through its close in 2008. Prior to Antioch, she served as Video Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY where she also presided over the Board of BCAM, the city’s public access cable TV facility. She is currently on the faculty and Executive Collective of the Nonstop Institute, a liberal arts educational project started in the wake of Antioch’s closure. Her recent curatorial work examines documentary media on US prisons, including the lecture/screening “Habeas Corpus: You Have the Body” (2005-07) and a suite of media art projects exploring the information-gathering strategies of honey bees, including “Sweetness and Labor”(2006). Recent publications include an interview with curator/educator Keiko Sei about her work on the Thai-Burma border in RISK (2008) and an essay on artist Barbara Lattanzi’s “idiomorphic” software projects that appropriate the editing strategies of 1970s experimental films, published in Millennium Film Journal (2003) and Performance Research (2004).
A World Rattled of Habit: Films by Ben Rivers (and Karl Kels & Barry Kimm)
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 30, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 6pm | Ben Rivers in person!
- Ben Rivers, Astika (2006). Image courtesy of the artist.
In the last three years, UK artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers has produced a series of rich, expressive portraits of people living on the wilderness fringes of Europe and the British Isles. Rivers builds a strong bond with his subjects, often living with them for periods of time, and his hand-crafted films are intimate medleys of the rhythms and mossy details that give shape to their lives. This evening Rivers draws upon his days co-programming the renowned Brighton Cinematheque to present his work. TRT: 70 min.
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Origin of the Species
UK, 2008, 16mm, 16 min.
A film begun as a portrait of S, a 75 year-old man living in a remote part of Inverness-shire. S has been obsessed with Darwin’s works for much of his life. Since a child he has wondered at life on Earth and though he never became an academic, found in Darwin many answers to his questions. The film images concentrate on the mysterious geography of his world; his garden, from the microcosmic to the grand; the contraptions and inventions he’s made; his isolated patch of land where he has built his house after a life of traveling and working around the world. The soundtrack has S heard discussing his take on life on Earth and humans place upon it. The film attempts to span from the beginnings of the world up to an uncertain future. (BR)
Measurements of Oxford
Barry Kimm, US, 1989, 16mm, 9 min.
The Oxford of the title is a small town in Iowa; the measurements in question are taken on everything but the kitchen sink, from gas pumps to street signs to the townsfolk themselves. Putting aside their midwestern scepticism, the inhabitants humor the filmmaker in his peculiar project, even acting as his cohorts. (New York Public Library)
Astika
UK, 2006, 16mm, 8 min.
A portrait of Astika, who lives on an island in Denmark. He has lived in a run down farm house for 15 years and his project has been to let the land around him grow unchecked, but now he has been forced to move out by people who prefer more pristine neighbours. (BR)
Ah, Liberty!
UK, 2008, 16mm, 19 min.
A family’s place in the widerness, somehow outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There’s no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived. (Chicago Underground Film Festival) Winner of the Tiger Award for Best Short Film, 2008 Rotterdam Film Festival
Prince Hotel
Karl Kels, Germany/US, 1987/2003, 16mm, 8 min.
A portrait of New York’s Bowery and its time-worn occupants. (Goethe-Institut)
A World Rattled of Habit
UK, 2008, 16mm, 10 min.
A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg. (BR)
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Ben Rivers is an artist and filmmaker. He lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited around the world and has received numerous awards, most recently the Tiger Award for Short Film, IFF Rotterdam 2008 and Best Experimental Film, Vila do Conde 2008. He has been the recipient of a number of commissions, including a London Artist’s Film and Video Award, for which he made two new works—ORIGIN OF SPECIES and AH, LIBERTY! Recent exhibitions include; “On Overgrown Paths” solo show, Permanent Gallery, Brighton; “Wild Shapes” Cell Project Space, London; “If—People and Places In Recent Film and Video” Bloomberg Space, London; Artist-in-focus screenings in Courtisane Festival, Ghent 2008; Pesaro International Film Festival 2008; London Film Festival 2008 and Punto de Vista, Spain 2009. Together with US artist filmmaker Ben Russell, he toured New Zealand/Australia in July/Aug 2008 with a two-person show “We Can Not Exist In This World Alone.” In 1996, Ben co-founded and since co-managed/programmed Brighton Cinematheque—renowned for screening a unique program of film from its earliest days through to the latest artists’ film and video.
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Ben Rivers at the Permanent Gallery
David Berridge interviews Ben Rivers (More Milk Yvette)
The Animated Films of Naoyuki Tsuji
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 20, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 6pm
- Naoyuki Tsuji, The Place Where We Were (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.
The work of Japanese animator Naoyuki Tsuji hovers between dream and nightmare, fairy tale and psychodrama. Tsuji animates his films with charcoal—drawing, erasing, and redrawing over a single sheet of paper. The erasures remain as ghostly afterimages, creating the sense that Tsuji’s characters are forever haunted by their pasts. The sky comes alive in Trilogy About Clouds (2005); angelic offspring are blinded by fire and water in A Feather Stare at the Dark (2003); and siblings escape their cannibalistic father, only to wander an anxious wilderness in Children of Shadows (2006). This evening’s screening also features, among others, the North American premiere of Tsuji’s latest film, The Place Where We Were (2008). Presented with the support of the Aichi Arts Center, Japan. TRT: ca 70 min.
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Trilogy About Clouds
Japan, 2005, 16mm, 13 min.
All-consuming clouds, terrible visions, dark eyes…Trilogy About Clouds is composed of the three mini-films Breathing Clouds, Looking at a Cloud, and From the Cloud. (Aurora)
A Feather Stare at the Dark
Japan, 2003, 16mm, 17 min.
This is the tale of the pre-world before earth, in chaos with forces of good and evil that have interfered with each other. It is going to build the chance of birth in the new world. The pre-world is carrying out a growth expansion at the same time, decaying. However, the force to the decay sets up birth in the coming world. (NT; translated by Ichirou Sueoka)
Children of the Shadows
Japan, 2006, 16mm, 18 min.
A boy and his sister are nearly eaten by their father and they rush out of the house. They run away in their father’s car and wind up in the wilderness, where they meet a Giant and a Witch. This animation film in black & white charcoal drawings uses the sound of a bass guitar and combines a Japanese Manga feel with a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. (Aurora)
The Place Where We Were
Japan, 2008, 16mm, 5 min. North American premiere!
A couple is seen at home. In the sky above their house a giant angel flies past. A forest has grown on the angel’s back, where three creatures sit around a table playing cards. They stop in a cave where a creature plays the harp for them and turns the cards into tears. The tears fly through the air and one of them reaches the woman’s womb. She is seen sitting at home, with her cat, contentedly stroking her pregnant belly. (NT)
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Naoyuki Tsuji is an artist and animator, working in film, sculpture, and illustration. He graduated from the Tokyo Zokei University in 1995 and currently lives and works in Yokohama, Japan. His films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the London Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Yokohama Triennial, among numerous additional festivals and galleries worldwide. He is the recipient of the Yokohama Award for Art and Cultural Encouragement.
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Cory Arcangel
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 10, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 6pm | Cory Arcangel in person!
Best known for his Nintendo game cartridge hacks, multi-media trickster Cory Arcangel uses new and vintage computers, sound, performance, and the web to recontextualize popular figures (Super Mario Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel) and aesthetic systems (the instructional video, adult contemporary music, the “artist talk”) in subversively comedic ways. This evening, he’ll provide an overview of his practice, possibly including his Super Mario movies, the epic and aptly titled performance piece Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum, and an archetypal “experimental film,” complete with digital scratches and Final Cut Pro countdown. Co-presented by SAIC’s Parlor Room. 1998–2008, Cory Arcangel, USA, multiple formats, ca. 60 min.
Cory Arcangel is a computer artist, performer, and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn. His work centers on his love of personal computers and the internet. He co-founded the Beige Programming Ensemble. Recent exhibitions include the Whitney Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Space1026, Philadelphia; the Migros Museum, Zurich; Team Gallery, New York; and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris. His online portfolio and web portal is located at: Cory Arcangel.
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Ed Halter Interviews Cory Arcangel (Rhizome)
Letters, Notes: Films by David Gatten
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 27, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 6pm | David Gatten in person!
- David Gatten, The Great Art of Knowing (2004). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Influenced equally by Stan Brakhage and Ludwig Wittgenstein.”—Ed Halter, Village Voice
For more than ten years, filmmaker and SAIC alum David Gatten’s serenely beautiful handmade films have employed experimental techniques—cellophane tape ink transfers and optical printing—to explore the relationships between text and image. Gatten transforms type into sensual topographies of time and place. The bulk of his work has centered around the books, journals, and letters of the William Byrd II family of 18th century Virginia to express the family’s ideas, secret passions, and public lives in poetic and expansive ways. This evening, Gatten will screen three of these films, including Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002), The Great Art of Knowing (2004), and How to Conduct a Love Affair (2007), along with the instructional Advanced Typing Tips Part 5 (anonymous, circa 1940) and sublime Film For Invisible Ink, Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter [Diminished by 1, 794] (2008). Co-presented by the University of Chicago Arts Council, which will present a second program of Gatten films on Friday, March 6 at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. 1940–2008, Multiple artists, USA, 16mm, ca 85 min.
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Secret History of the Dividing Line
US, 2002, 16mm, b/w, silent, 20 min.
Paired texts as dueling histories; a journey imagined and remembered; 57 mileage markers produce an equal number of prospects. The first part of the Byrd cycle, the film focus on two texts by William Byrd, one published and official, the other secret and circulated privately. A torn timeline tells the history of the world and magnified, misaligned cement splices stand in for early 18th century landscapes. (DG)
The Great Art of Knowing
US, 2004, 16mm, b/w, silent, 37 min.
The fourth 16mm film in the Byrd project series. Taking as a point of departure the volume of the same title by the 17th century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, this films attempts a peripatetic exploration of empiricism over the last 500 years. Additional material is drawn from Byrd’s papers, Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as writings by David Hume and Jules-Etienne Marey. (DG)
How to Conduct A Love Affair
US, 2007, 16mm, color, silent, 8 min.
An unexpected letter leads to an unanticipated encounter. Some windows open easily; other shadows remain locked rooms. Advice is sometimes easy to give, but often hard to follow. Have a cup of tea dear: I’ll trade you a stitch from the past in return for a leaf from the future. At once a Valentine for a friend and a section from the next installment of the Byrd project, this film is composed of words from a 1924 instructional text, close-ups of dried tea bags sewn together into a quilt and found objects that reflect light from the past and cast shadows on the future. (DG)
Advanced Typing Tips Part 5
US, Anonymous, circa 1940, color, sound, 5 min.
An instructional film.
Film for Invisible Ink, Case no. 142: Abbreviation For Dead Winter [diminished by 1,794]
US, 2008, 16mm, b/w, silent sound, 13 min.
The second film in the Invisible Ink series is generated from single sheet of paper, with ink-and-cellophane tape transfers and microphotography of paper fibers. A long-distance dedication for a far-away friend half-way up the mountain, with words by Charles Darwin. (DG)
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David Gatten—filmmaker, Henry James fan, recent Guggenheim fellow, and aspiring audio book producer—makes bookish films about letters and libraries and lovers and ghosts that are filled with words, some of which you can read. His work has shown around the popular planet Earth in museums, festivals, biennials, galleries, archives, access centers, elementary schools, storefronts, on sides of buildings and once on a barge that was floating down river. You can find his films in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago but only rarely can he find his glasses. He lives and works by the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn and on Seabrook Island, South Carolina and teaches 16mm filmmaking/Wallace Stevens appreciation at The Cooper Union in New York City.
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Henriette Huldisch on David Gatten (ArtForum)
DDR/DDR
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 20, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009, 6pm | Director Amie Siegel in person!
- DDR/DDR (Amie Siegel, 2008). Image courtesy of the artist.
The latest feature by artist, filmmaker, and SAIC alum Amie Siegel (Empathy, 2003) is a multi-layered and disarmingly beautiful essay on the German Democratic Republic and its dissolution, which left many of its former citizens adrift in their newfound freedom. Featured at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, DDR/DDR weaves together mundane Stasi surveillance footage, interviews with psychoanalysts, East German “Indian hobbyists,” and lolling shots of derelict state radio stations into an extended and self-conscious assemblage to meditate on history, memory, and the shared technologies of state control and art. 2008, Amie Siegel, Germany/USA, HDCAM video, 135 min.
Amie Siegel works variously in 16mm and 35mm film, video, sound and writing. Born in Chicago, she currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. She received her BA from Bard College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions and screenings include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, “The Russian Linesman,” Hayward Gallery, London; “Forum Expanded,” KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Austrian Film Museum, Berlin International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Andy Warhol Museum, BFI Southbank, London; Frankfurt Film Museum and Film Forum in New York. Her first book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA) was published in 1999. Siegel has been an artist-in-residence of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.
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The Dance Camera: Locked & Loaded
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 13, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009, 6pm | Curator Danièle Wilmouth in person!
Read the Chicago Reader capsule by Andrea Gronvall here.
- Miranda Pennell, Tattoo (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.
In an effort to dispel the notion that the dance film is largely a decorative and apolitical genre, The Dance Camera: Locked & Loaded is an international collection of films and videos that confront the camera’s power to manipulate identity, create celebrity, and automate the viewer’s gaze. Curated by filmmaker and SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth, these charged works serve as compelling activist documents against a range of global injustices, including sexism, xenophobia, and colonialism. Works include: Je Suis Une Bombe (Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006), You Made Me Love You (Miranda Pennell & John Smith, UK, 2005), Dansons (Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Algeria/France, 2003), Element (Amy Greenfield, USA, 1973), Tattoo (Miranda Pennell, UK, 2001), Black Spring (Heddy Maalem, Algeria/France/Nigeria, 2002), Familie Tezcan (Nevin Aladag, Turkey/Germany, 2001), Elegy (Douglas Wright & Chris Graves, New Zealand, 1993). Special thanks to Kali Heitholt, who assisted with this program. 1973–2006, multiple artists, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 80 min.
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You Made Me Love You
Miranda Pennell & John Smith UK, 2005, 3.5 min
Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be traumatic.
“…On the one hand, this is like looking at a group of aliens who have never seen anything like the camera (or you) before. The concentration of the faces on what is before them takes away their self-consciousness, and like a series of Thomas Ruff portraits, they have an unsettling air of insouciance. But ultimately, the thought one is drawn to, and the allegory the title suggests, concern the contemporary obsession with becoming visible through some sort of brush with celebrity, however brief, demeaning or meaningless that might be.” — Dr. Stephen Riley
Je Suis Une Bombe
Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006, 6:12 min.
A figure in a panda bear costume performs an erotic pole dance. On removing the panda’s head, a woman is revealed, and she addresses the camera. She delivers her own praises of a complex image of woman, simultaneously strong and vulnerable—a potential powder keg. Performer: Carine Charaire. Music: Michael Hilton
Element
Dir: Hilary Harris, Choreography/Performer: Amy Greenfield, USA, 1973, 12 min
“Element raises issues of the active image of a woman’s body on film. Greenfield’s body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle, which is both birthlike and deathlike, and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal concept of female sensuality.” — Canyon Cinema
Elegy
Dir: Chris Graves, Choreography/Performer: Douglas Wright, New Zealand, 1993, 10 min
Douglas Wright is an openly gay dancer and choreographer from New Zealand. He danced with Limbs Dance Company of New Zealand (1980-1983), the Paul Taylor Company of New York (1983-87) and DV8 Physical Theatre of London (1988) before forming the Douglas Wright Dance Company in Auckland in 1989. In 2004, his first book Ghost Dance was released, part love story, part memoir, a deeply felt meditation on the art of performance. The 2006 season of his stage work Black Milk was accompanied by the publication of his second book Terra Incognito. In October 2007 a poetry collection, Laughing Mirror was published, at which time Wright announced his retirement from dance.
“The self-confident innovator, the prime mover with an incredible athletic ability, Douglas Wright, in the late 1980s and early 90s established himself as possibly the best—the most profound—choreographer New Zealand has ever produced. Certainly, he is the most visceral, the most gutsy, creating dance works that combined a kind of unstoppable callisthenic zest with philosophical ideas done out as images: dance as an articulation of the human condition.” — David Eggleton
“Anger is not just mine, anger is like petrol if somebody gets angry someone nearby will catch fire. It’s about exploring the way energy can be transformed through art. I’m lucky, I’ve been given more than my share of anger, so I’ve got a lot of it to transform.” — Douglas Wright
Tattoo
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2001, 9 min
Trees, insects and birds look-on as the countryside is invaded by a lost regiment of soldiers engaged in a repetitive display. The senseless beauty of a military drill dwarfed by the landscape, is by turns absurd and disturbing. The choreography of military drill here is entirely drawn from the tradition of the Light Division of the British Army. Soldiers and band of the Light Division filmed on Salisbury Plane. Music for military-band scored for the film by Graeme Miller.
Dansons (Let Us Dance)
Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Algeria/France, 2003, 5:35 min
The brilliantly concise Dansons shows in a single take the midriff of a woman belly-dancing to La Marseillaise. It is a startlingly clear image of the clash of colonialism with indigenous culture. The military relentlessness of the anthem is in deep contrast to the sensuousness of the body wrapped in the colours of the French tricolour.
Familie Tezcan (The Tezcan Family)
Nevin Aladag, Turkey/Germany, 2001, 6:40 min
A video portrait of a German family with Turkish heritage, practicing breakdance and singing in four different languages.
“Aladag, born in 1972 in Van in eastern Turkey and now living in Berlin, often focuses on foreignness and self-determination as they are experienced by young people of Turkish origin in Germany today. Demarcation and amalgamation, the search for cultural roots and social connection: Aladag is trying to create individual meaning within the larger context of the production of identity.” — Harald Fricke, Artforum
Black Spring
Dir: Benoit Dervaux, Choreographer: Heddy Maalem, Algeria/France/Nigeria, 2002, 26 min
“Born in Algiers to a French mother and Algerian father, now living in Toulouse and creating tribal-infused contemporary choreography for dancers from Francophone African countries, Heddy Maalem creates stark investigations of race and identity. — Sharon Hoyer
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Danièle Wilmouth creates hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. Her works—Curtain of Eyes (1997), Tracing a Vein (2001), Round (2002), Hula Lou (2007), and A Heretic’s Primer on Love and Exertion (2007), have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and on television worldwide. In 1990 she began a six-year residency in the Kansai region of Japan, where she cofounded “Hairless Films,” an independent filmmaking collective. While in Japan, she also studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh under Katsura Kan, and performed with his troupe “The Saltimbanques.” She is currently on faculty in the film and video departments of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. More info at Hairless Films.
Through the Looking Glass: Videos by Cecelia Condit
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 12, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 6pm | Cecelia Condit in person!
- Cecelia Condit, Annie Lloyd (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.
Since the early 1980s, Cecelia Condit has garnered acclaim for her sweetly gruesome stories of menaced and menacing women. Cultural critic Laura Kipnis calls Condit, “the most serious practitioner of the grotesque in video art” and media scholar Patricia Mellencamp hails her videos as “feminist fairy tales.” Condit sets Brothers Grimm-like parables in the suburban landscape of the American Midwest, mixing black humor, lush photography, and eerily sing-song soundtracks to unearth the dark fantasies lurking there. She writes, “my work centers around the theme of how bizarre events disrupt mundane lives. By contrasting the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, I address a reality that is both surprisingly believable yet strange enough to belong only to the realm of fiction.” Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. 1983-2008, DVCAM video, USA, ca 70 min.
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Possibly in Michigan
Cecelia Condit, 1983, DVCAM video, 12 min
Possibly in Michigan is an operatic fairy tale of cannibalism, desire and dread in Middle America, a densely collaged narrative in which Beauty meets the Beast in the surreal landscape of shopping-mall suburbia.
Not a Jealous Bone
Cecelia Condit, music by Stephen Vogel, 1987, DVCAM video, 11 min.
Invoking a biblical story of life coming from dry bones, Condit constructs an experimental narrative about an older woman’s confrontation with her own mortality after the death of her mother. The bone represents the promise of youth and hope-a promise jealously coveted by the young, but needed more by those grown old.
Oh, Rapunzel
Cecelia Condit w/Dick Blau, music by Stephen Vogel, 1996/2008, DVCAM video, 24 min.
In Oh, Rapunzel, when Rapunzel flees the tower, Condit’s mother leaves her home for an independent living facility and a freedom that she has never known.
Annie Lloyd
Cecelia Condit, 2008, DVCAM video, 19 min.
Annie Lloyd is an unflinching valentine to Condit’s mother in the last years of her life and an intimate portrayal of the creativity and wisdom of old age.
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Cecelia Condit studied sculpture at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA; received a B.F.A. in sculpture at the Philadelphia College of Art, and an M.F.A. in photography from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She has received numerous awards for her work including fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the American Film Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mary L. Nohl Fund. Her videos have been widely shown internationally at institutions and festivals including the Biennale de Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI. She is currently Professor of Film and Video and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Condit’s exhibition at CUE Art Foundation marks her first solo show in New York.
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Cecelia Condit at the CUE Art Foundation
Sight & Sound: Flingco Sound System
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 3, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 6pm | Special live performance! Artists in person!
- Lisa Slodki & Haptic, The Medium (2007). Image courtesy of the artists.
Flingco Sound System releases “textures in the shape of sound.”–Dublab
Since its 2007 launch, Chicago’s Flingco Sound System label has played host to a slate of musicians who work collaboratively with visual artists to create darkly mesmerizing videos and richly textured live performances. Tonight, CATE teams up with FSS to present not-to-be-missed live collaborations by the drone-based Chicago trio Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg) and real-time video artist Lisa Slodki; the end-of-days strings and digital soundscapes of Interbellum (Brendan Burke), with multi-media artist Annie Feldmeier Adams; as well as the short video Avici (2008), by SAIC alum Clayton Flynn and the experimental Richmond, VA trio Cristal (Jimmy Anthony, Greg Darden and Bobby Donne). 2005–09, multiple artists, Austria/USA, multiple formats, 90 min.
Flingco Sound System was started by Bruce Adams, the co-founder of kranky, an independent record label that Pitchfork recently lauded for its “hard earned niche” and “uncompromising spirit.” The new label is equally innovative, supporting and releasing its musicians’ audio-visual collaborations—FSS’s forthcoming Haptic LP will include a DVD of rotating fourth member Lisa Slodki’s album-length video; FSS’s Interbellum release features media produced by Brendan Burke, the man behind Interbellum, and Annie Feldmeier Adams using Burke’s handheld video footage from a transatlantic sailing voyage; among others. The label is designed to adapt to and take advantage of new digital distribution streams and tap into the rejuvenated market for vinyl. FSS releases DRM-free high sample rate downloads, limited edition LPs on 180 gram vinyl with download coupons, and a subscription service.
The Presentation Theme: New & Old Films by Jim Trainor
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 14, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 6pm | Jim Trainor in person!
- Jim Trainor, The Presentation Theme (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.
The work of celebrated Chicago filmmaker and SAIC professor Jim Trainor revels in the world between playfulness and prurience with shaky, line-drawn animations of animals, humans, and their habits. Tonight he presents two new films alongside some favorites and obscurities. Premiering are The Presentation Theme (2008), the story of a Peruvian POW outmaneuvered by a hematophagous priestess, and The Little Garden of Herbert S. Zim (2008), in which a school library’s science section comes creakily to life. Also featured: zoo denizens fail to strike a healthy balance between impulse and rationality in The Animals and Their Limitations (1998–2004), a naturalist shares his prizes with visiting scholars in The Skulls, and the Skulls and the Bones, and the Bones (2003), and a novice bicyclist pedals without incident in Serene Velocity (2004). 1998—2008, Jim Trainor, USA, multiple formats, ca 80 min.
Jim Trainor has been making animated films since he was thirteen. In that time his medium has changed little – his preferred technique is black magic marker on typing paper. He grew up in Washington DC, and lived in New York City in his 20s and 30s. The Fetishist (1997), a portrait of a serial killer, took him eleven years to make and is highly unpleasant, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. A series of films about animals – The Bats, The Moschops, The Magic Kingdom and Harmony – followed, and have been widely screened, sometimes under the collective title The Animals and Their Limitations. The third-mentioned was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2000 Mr. Trainor got a teaching job at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now lodged happily. Beyond filmmaking, his passions include looking closely at birds and insects and reading forgotten anthropology books of the 1920s.
More
The Chicago Reader: Jim Trainor (Fred Camper)
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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.
