Still from “Sibling Topics (Section A)” (Ryan Trecartin, 2009). Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

“Both in form and in function, Ryan Trecartin’s video practice advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative, and identity, while also propelling these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life” (Kevin McGarry). This evening, as part of a special two-part presentation organized by the Visiting Artists Program and Conversations at the Edge, Trecartin will introduce two pieces from his latest project, Trill-ogy Comp (2009-10): Sibling Topics (Section A) (2009) and P.opular S.ky (section ish) (2009). Trecartin will give an overview of his practice on  April 14 at 6pm in the SAIC Columbus Auditorium. Ryan Trecartin, 2009, USA, HDCAM video, ca. 90 min.

RYAN TRECARTIN (b. 1981, Webster, TX) holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004). Trecartin, whose videos have screened all over the world–from Belgrade and Basel to Brazil–is the recipient of the first Jack Wolgin Prize in the Fine Arts (2009), presented by Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, as well as a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2008). He has had solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; and The Power Plant, Toronto, among others. Group exhibitions include: The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York; the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; Installations II: Video from the Guggenheim Collections, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbão; the 2008 Busan Biennale, South Korea; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and many more. Trecartin lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

MORE
Ryan Trecartin on YouTube
Ryan Trecartin at Elizabeth Dee Gallery
Ryan Trecartin in the New York Times

Still from “Ben” (Emily Wardill, 2007). Courtesy the artist and LUX.

The films of British artist Emily Wardill are brilliant cinematic labyrinths. Visually striking and playfully rigorous, they draw upon an array of sources– underground theater, psychoanalytic case studies, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Rancière, and even the game logic of Nintendo Wii–to pose fundamental questions about vision, representation, and media and their role in how we come to know ourselves. Wardill has been the recipient of much recent critical acclaim: Tate Modern film curator Stuart Comer rated her film The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008) as one of his top ten picks of 2008 and The Guardian newspaper deemed her its “artist of the week.” In this special program, Wardill presents five of her short films, all of which are Chicago premieres: Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the Soul (2005), Basking in What Feels Like ‘An Ocean Of Grace’ I Soon Realise That I’m Not Looking at It, But Rather I Am It, Recognising Myself (2006), Ben (2007), Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck (2007), and The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter). Co-presented by CATE and Refracted Lens, a Chicago-based film series dedicated to showcasing emerging and underrepresented artists. Emily Wardill, 2005-08, United Kingdom, 16mm, ca. 60 min (plus discussion).

Wardill will present her debut feature film, Game Keepers Without Game, on Friday, April 9 at 6pm, at SAIC’s graduate student-run series, Eye & Ear Clinic (112 S. Michigan Ave, MacLean Theater Room 1307, free and open to the public).

EMILY WARDILL (b. 1977, Rugby, England) lives and works in London.  She received a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in 2000, where she is currently a senior lecturer. Her new feature film, Game Keepers without Game (2009), was exhibited at The Showroom, London, in February 2010. She will have solo shows at De Appel, Amsterdam, and Spacex, in Exeter, UK, later in the year. Other solo exhibitions include Picture This, Bristol; Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London; Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Germany; STANDARD, Oslo; and Fulham Palace, London. Wardill has contributed to a number of group exhibitions at the ICA, London (2007); Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK (2005); Espace Electra, Paris (2005); PS.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2004); and the Freud Museum, London (2004). Her work has been screened at the Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain; the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and the London Film Festival. Wardill is the recipient of the first ever Follow Fluxus ­ After Fluxus grant (2008), as well as the Film London Artist Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) Bristol Mean Time residency (2007), and she was shortlisted for the 2008 Jarman Award. She is part of the creative group, Boxing Club, and assists in the coordination of the performance, live music, and screening event, Itchy Park.

Still from “On the Third Planet from the Sun” (Pavel Medvedev, 2006). Courtesy the artist.

The documentaries of Pavel Medvedev are haunting portraits of some of post-Soviet Russia’s most isolated people and places. This rare screening presents four different facets of Medvedev’s remarkable oeuvre. Vacation in November (2002) follows Russian miners in the tundra. On a forced furlough from their regular jobs, they embark on an annual massive reindeer slaughter to supplement their income. On the Third Planet from the Sun (2006) studies life in the country’s resource-rich Arkhangelsk region, where inhabitants forage for scrap metal left behind from H-bomb testing. Wedding of Silence (2003) depicts a deaf community in St. Petersburg, juxtaposing an expressive wedding celebration with the din of a foundry where many work. Following a different kind of party, Medvedev’s The Unseen (2007) captures the behind-the-scenes dinners and rituals of the 2006 G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, along with their corresponding impact on Russian citizens. Russian with English subtitles. Pavel Medvedev, 2003-08, Russia, 35mm and Beta SP video, ca. 100 min.

PAVEL MEDVEDEV (b. 1963, Orenburg, Russia) graduated from the Leningrad State Culture Institute in 1990. In 1992, he graduated from the Higher School for TV directors (workshop of Sarukhanov). From 1993-2000, he worked as a television director in St. Petersburg, and since 2000, he has been working as a film director at the St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio. His films have received many awards at festivals, including Best Documentary at Karlovy International Film Festival (2004, Wedding of Silence) and the Prize of the Jury of FIPRESCI (Jury of International Film Critics) at the International Film Festival Oberhausen (2008, The Unseen).

Still from “Unnamed Film” (Naomi Uman, 2008), part of the Ukrainian Time Machine, 2008. Courtesy the artist.

In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. The result of her adventures is the quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian Time Machine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life– traditions that are eroding with the encroaching pressures of modernity–Uman creates a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve. In this evening’s program, Uman will present Unnamed Film, her keen documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ various strategies of labor and resourcefulness necessary for survival; Kalendar, a poetic collection of shots, one for each month of an entire year; and Coda, a black-and-white epilogue encapsulating the themes of the series as a whole. Naomi Uman, 2008, Ukraine, 16mm, ca. 70 min (plus discussion).

NAOMI UMAN (b. 1962, New York, NY) received an MFA in Filmmaking from California Institute of the Arts in 1998. Her experimental documentary films have been exhibited widely at the Sundance and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, The New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among others. She has also screened her work at The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian, and Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, Tribeca Media Arts, and she was a 2007-8 Fulbright Scholar.

Still from “ekleipsis” (Tran, T. Kim-Trang, 1998), part of the Blindness Series, 1992-2006. Courtesy the artist and the Video Data Bank.

The Blindness Series is Los Angeles-based artist Tran, T. Kim-Trang’s expansive, fourteen-years-in-the-making tour de force on vision and its metaphors.  Comprised of eight videos, the series draws upon notions of blindness to explore broader political and cultural themes of identity, sexuality, society, and technology.  This evening, to celebrate the Video Data Bank’s release of The Blindness Series in a new DVD box-set, Tran will present five works from the cycle, including a provocative documentary on hysterical blindness and the Cambodian civil war (ekleipsis, 1998); an essay on cosmetic eyelid surgery (operculum, 1993); and a meditation on the phenomenon of word blindness (alexia, 2000).  “We are invited to approach these works with all our senses,” writes scholar Laura Marks. “The Blindness Series, crankily, and finally tenderly, gives us our eyes back.” Tran, T. Kim-Trang, 1992-2006, USA, Beta SP video, ca. 82 min (plus discussion).

TRAN, T. KIM-TRANG (b. 1966, Saigon, Vietnam) emigrated to the U.S. in 1975. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been producing experimental videos since the early 1990s. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in solo and group screenings, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Tran is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, having been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Getty Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship. Tran also collaborates with Karl Mihail on a project known as Gene Genies Worldwide© (www.genegenies.com). Their conceptual and public artworks on genetic engineering have exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; Exit Art, New York; the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York and elsewhere in the United States. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Scripps College.

Still from “Melter 2″ (Takeshi Murata, 2003). Courtesy the artist.

For the last six years, artist Takeshi Murata and musician Robert Beatty (Hair Police, Three Legged Race) have collaborated on a series of visceral glitch-based animations, setting Murata’s psychedelic imagery to Beatty’s hypnotic compositions. Murata’s videos range from hand-drawn animations of fluidly morphing shapes to painterly abstractions of meticulously hijacked digital code. Beatty employs hacked electronics and thrift store cast-offs to craft otherworldly sonic narratives. Together, the duo’s electronic alchemy transforms the detritus of consumer culture into dazzling tapestries of sound and color. This evening, CATE teams up with experimental music and intermedia series Lampo to bring you Murata and Beatty in a special screening and performance. The two will present their work in three sets: a solo performance by Beatty, a screening of videos by Murata, and a new audio-visual performance, created especially for this program, by both. Visit www.lampo.org. Takeshi Murata and Robert Beatty, 2003-10, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min.

TAKESHI MURATA (b.1974, Chicago, IL) graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a BFA in Film/Video/Animation. In 2007, Murata was the subject of a solo exhibition, Black Box: Takeshi Murata, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. His work has been included in solo and group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Peres Projects, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Eyebeam, New York; FACT Centre, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; New York Underground Film Festival; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Foxy Production, New York, and Deitch Projects, New York, among others.

ROBERT BEATTY (b.1981, Lexington, KY) is an artist and electronic musician who performs solo under the name Three Legged Race. He is a long-running member of the bands Hair Police, Eyes and Arms of Smoke, and C. Spencer Yeh’s Burning Star Core. Through Beatty’s collaboration with Takeshi Murata, Three Legged Race has performed at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; Deitch Projects, New York; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh), and the New Museum, New York. Beatty’s performances and recordings explore the repetition and decay of simple musical themes. With each tier of abstraction, they discover a new world of rhythmic and harmonic possibilities while also evoking minimalist sci-fi soundtracks and clouded hypnotic landscapes. He lives in Lexington, where he runs the Mountaain record label.

Sterling Ruby, still from Transient Trilogy, 2005-9

Hailed as “one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century” by Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Los Angeles-based artist and SAIC alumnus Sterling Ruby is known for his aggressive biomorphic sculptures, defaced minimalist forms, and large spray-painted canvases. His videos are similarly charged, referencing pornography, abstract painting, and evoking states of transience, entropy, and transgression. In Hole (2002), workers in the back room of a chain store surreptitiously and suggestively stuff merchandise into a hole in a plaster wall. Transient Trilogy (2005-09) finds Ruby playing both a drifter, who fashions talismans from the detritus of an overgrown urban wasteland, and a diva director, who belittles his beleaguered star. For Triviality (2009), Ruby trains his lens on adult movie star Tom Colt, stripped from porn’s traditional tropes and trappings, as he tries unsuccessfully to get himself off. Also on the program: Dihedral (2006) and Cartographic Yard Work: Dog Behavior (2009). Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. Sterling Ruby, 2002-09, USA, Beta SP video and DVD, ca. 65 min (plus discussion).

STERLING RUBY (b.1972, Bitburg, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Ruby takes his subject matter from a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum security prisons, modernist architecture, artifacts and antiquities, graffiti, bodybuilders, the mechanisms of warfare, cults and cult members, and urban gangs. His work invokes minimalism as a means to expose underlying systems and social power structures. Selected exhibitions include: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (both 2009); GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (solo) (2008-09); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (solo); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; The Drawing Center, New York (solo) (all 2008); The Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art (2007); The California Biennial, Newport Beach (2006); The Renaissance Society, Chicago; The Turin Triennial (both 2005-06); Aspen Art Museum (2005); Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo, Amsterdam (both 2005). Ruby is represented by PaceWildenstein and Foxy Production in New York. His videos are distributed by the Video Data Bank.

Still from Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978-79). Courtesy the Video Data Bank.

Thirty years before the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up, artist Dara Birnbaum hijacked television imagery in a series of coolly ironic videos that recontextualized pop cultural icons (Wonder Woman, Kojak, Laverne & Shirley), TV grammar (inserts, two-shots, wipes), and genres (soap operas, sitcoms, game shows) to reveal their ideological subtexts. Birnbaum described her videos as late 20^th century “ready-mades”–works that “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.” Now renowned as a pioneer in televisual appropriation, she is currently the subject of a major retrospective that began at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium, and will tour to Museu Fundação Serralves in Porto, Portugal, later in the spring. This evening, Birnbaum will present an overview of her practice, with examples from her seminal early videos (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79; Pop Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Speed Skating, 1980), music videos and commercial spots (Airbreak, MTV Inc., 1987), gallery installations (Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission, 1989-90), large-scale, interactive outdoor pieces (Rio Videowall, 1989), as well as her latest works. Dara Birnbaum, 1978-2010, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).

DARA BIRNBAUM (b. 1946, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY.  Previous major solo exhibitions, career overviews, and retrospective screenings include: Kunsthalle Wien and the Norrtälje Konsthall (Sweden); The American Film Institute, Los Angeles and Washington; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Kunstmuseum, Bern; The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Jewish Museum, New York; IVAM Centre de Carme, Valencia; and the Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, in addition to numerous international group shows and museum collections. She has also exhibited in Documenta VII, VIII, and IX, as well as at numerous Venice Biennales. Birnbaum has received myriad awards, including the Special Jury Prize, Deutscher Videokunstpreis, Südwestfunk, Baden-Baden, and Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, 1992; TV Picture Prize, XII Festival International de la Vidéo et des Arts Electroniques, Locarno, Switzerland, 1991; Certificate in Recognition of Service and Contribution to the Arts, Harvard University, 1988; The Maya Deren, American Film Institute Award for Independent Film and Video, 1987; and First Prize for Video, San Sebastian Film Festival, 1983. Birnbaum is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. Her work is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Video Data Bank.

Still from “The Indian Boundary Line,” 2010. Courtesy the Artist.

Over the last eight years, local musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005). This evening, Comerford will present the world premiere of The Indian Boundary Line (2010). The film follows, as Comerford notes, “a road very close to my home in Chicago, Rogers Avenue,” that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between “the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences.”  Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on history and its relationship to the landscape, with its own shifting boundaries, designs, uses and inhabitants across two centuries.  With Land Marked/Marquette. Thomas Comerford, 2010, USA, DigiBeta video and 16mm, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).

THOMAS COMERFORD (b. 1970, Richmond, VA) is a media artist, musician, and educator residing in Chicago. Trained in sculpture, performance, and the classics, he began making films in the early 1990s. In 1997, he embarked on an influential series of films, made with a handmade pinhole motion picture camera and microphone, under the title, Cinema Obscura (1997-2002). His recent films are site-specific to Chicago and explore the evidence, revision, and erasure of histories in the landscape. His work has screened at festivals and venues, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the London Film Festival. Comerford has also toured the United States with his films, screening in spaces ranging from church basements and backyards to regular old movie theatres. As songwriter, singer, and producer for the rock band Kaspar Hauser, Comerford has performed his music around the Midwest and eastern U.S. and released three LP records. He currently teaches film production, DIY exhibition, and punk rock history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben Russell, Let Each One Go Where He May (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

Fresh from its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chicago-based filmmaker and SAIC alumnus Ben Russell’s stunning feature debut is an epic road movie that draws from documentary and ethnography to imbue its images with a sense of mystery and enchantment. Set in contemporary Suriname (in northeastern South America) and unfolding in 13 extended takes, the film follows two unidentified brothers as they trek from the capital of Paramaribo to the rainforest villages of the Maroons, descendants of African slaves who rebelled against their Dutch captors 300 years ago. Retracing these ancestors’ footsteps, in the opposite direction villagers now take to pursue the global enterprise of the city, Let Each One Go Where He May charts a reverse course through urban congestion, illegal gold mines, Maroon communities, and trance ceremonies to capture a place where history, the supernatural, and modernity collide. 2009, Suriname/USA, 16mm, 135 min.

BEN RUSSELL is an itinerant photographer, curator, and experimental film/video artist whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art (solo).  Russell received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. In addition to his filmmaking, he founded the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island in 2004 and the Chicago gallery BEN RUSSELL in 2009. A 2008 Guggenheim award recipient, Russell currently teaches at the University of Illinois–Chicago.

“The Unbroken Path: Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May” by Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010 Tiger Awards Announces Let Each One Go Where He May as one of three contenders

Let Each One Go Where He May (EXCERPT) from Ben Russell on Vimeo.