Welcome to the 2016 BFA and MFA Media Arts Festival and screenings! Here you will encounter the next generation of film, video, new media, animation, and sound artists as SAIC students present their thesis projects. In this festival, you will experience innovative live-action shorts, all kinds of animation, feature-length narrative and nonfiction works, video essays, and experimental digital and audio pieces that will provoke, pleasure, instigate, and surprise you.
In FVNMA and at SAIC, we embrace radicalities of different shapes, sizes and forms in our experimental Media Arts. We encourage and are committed to a fluidity of ideas, theories, and practices. FVNMA students move far beyond traditional approaches, often working in interdisciplinary ways. The works here cross and intermix technologies, genres, and approaches, manifesting new and hybrid forms of expression.
We salute all these graduating students in celebrating the work that they will now share with us. We appreciate your time, labor, love, and the community that you have built together with us these last few years as you worked hard to compose, write, shoot, record, re-enact, direct, perform, edit, sample, digitize, experiment, generate, render, draw, model, design, photograph, chroma-key, interact, loop, re-mix, re-author, re-form, collaborate, improvise, craft, and hone your materials, ideas, sounds, and visions.
We congratulate you all, and wish you the best in your continuing lives as artists!
Mary Patten
chair, FVNMA
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
May, 2016
Presented by the Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies in collaboration with the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation
Department, and the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Special thanks to Chris Sullivan, Daniel Eisenberg, Eric Fleischauer, and Claudia Hart for their work programming the 2016 Festival. And an extra-special shout-out to Brandon Doherty of the Gene Siskel Film Center, and to Mickey Mahoney, Emily Kuehn, Andrew Zoleta, and Dan Holmes in FVNMA for technical support.
FVNMA 2016 program two (download)
May 11
Program 2
5:00 – 5:50 p.m.
Nicholas Nakai Garcia
Taylor Larned
Gavin Ringquist
NICHOLAS NAKAI GARCIA
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Dark Matter, 2016
digital video, 3d animation, Depthkit mapping sound, color
7:00
“…all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates.
TAYLOR LARNED
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
She Believed She Could, So She Did (gift), 2016 digital video
sound, color
15:30
Ty Rykeyn, Rose, Bobby.
GAVIN RINGQUIST
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Thrall, 2016 digital video sound, color
9:00
Thrall is a narrative work which observes the psychological manipulation of a man held hostage in a claustrophobic environment.
FVNMA 2016 program three (download)
May 11
Program 3
6:00 – 7:50 p.m.
Thumpdrag (Ethan Kaplan)
Yuyeol Chun
Chanel Kaliski
Misael Jose Oquendo
THUMPDRAG
BFA SOUND
Ambedo, 2016 digital video / sound sound, color
10:00
A meditation of the past and the deep dwellings of the heart, Ambedo is a sample-based journey into the practice of longing, the process of loss, and the hope of personal renewal. Divided into four separate pieces, the work is meant to be felt rather than contemplated, as love tends to be.
YUYEOL CHUN
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Wrapping Up, 2016 digital video
sound, color
33:15
Wrapping Up is a narrative short about a girl who is stuck between END and START.
This thirty-minute short was shot in Canon 60D, and I was the screen writer, DP, camera man, sound mixer, director, and editor. The film doesn’t really explain the character’s background, as much as life doesn’t explain everything.
CHANEL KALISKI
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Pills, 2015 digital video sound, color
31:30
Pills is a documentary about the dark side of taking ADD medication; the experiences and side effects that the pharmaceutical industry does not want you to know about. SAIC students discuss severe side effects including strokes, seizures, brainzaps, and hallucinations.
MISAEL JOEL OQUENDO
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
La Libertad, 2016 digital video sound, color
8:15
As a search for water unravels, candid moments are slowed and abstracted as a montage of gluttonous characters at a bar are observed by a disembodied voice.
FVNMA 2016 program four (download)
May 11
Program 4
8:00 – 9:50 p.m.
Livia Margon
Chanel Kaliski
Ferrell Lamothe
Sam YiYao Chao
LIVIA MARGON
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
The Devil Between Us, 2016 digital video
sound, b/w
14:00
Two strangers contemplating suicide for different reasons are stuck on a roof. Evelyn has been given a death sentence at the prime of her youth. By his own choice, Adam can’t bare to live another day. This film explores the idea of survival and finding likeness in the most unlikely of human interactions.
CHANEL KALISKI
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Always Flying, 2014 digital video
sound, b/w
8:00
Leaving a party with the intention to buy more alcohol, Tatiana makes the life-changing decision to get in the car with a drunk driver. The car crash leaves her unable to walk for the rest of her life. This film explores her story and the ability of art to help heal from tragedy.
SAM YIYAO CHAO
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Sweet Sweat Fish in-between Sea and Shore, 2016 audio translated to digital video
sound, color
30:32
A family-friendly film, please watch. The image is blank due to overexposure of the sunlight during a summer when Sam collects worn-out white cloth shoes named Pat Fan Yu. The audio is rich and the subtitles are clear.
FERRELL LAMOTHE
BFA FILM, VIDEO, NEW MEDIA, AND ANIMATION
Abhi, 2015 digital video sound, color
26:53
This non-traditional documentary provides the audience with a more an intimate look at the subject. Special thanks to Abhijeet Rane and J Frank Wilson. And thanks to my mom and dad, Joanne and Dean, for always supporting me—I love you so much!