CURRENT SEASON
Eleanore & the Timekeeper
Thursday, September 16, 6 p.m.
Danièle Wilmouth in person!
- Still from “Eleanore & the Timekeeper” (Danièle Wilmouth, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.
Best known for her striking performance films, award-winning Chicago filmmaker and SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth’s first feature is an intimate portrait of the complex bond between her aging grandmother and developmentally disabled uncle in rural Pennsylvania. Companions for the last 64 years—in times both idyllic and difficult—Eleanore and Ronnie are forced to embark on new, separate lives in the face of Eleanore’s advancing age and waning health. Ronnie finds new freedom in a group home while Eleanore copes with loneliness and heartbreak in the modest farmhouse where Ronnie grew up. Throughout this seven-year chronicle, Wilmouth meditates on the modest gestures and daily rituals that have bound the two together, tying them to the rhythms of small-town America and larger cycles of death and rebirth. The result is a clear-eyed and moving meditation on everyday life, transience, and familial love. Danièle Wilmouth, 2010, USA, 16mm on DigiBeta video, 76 min (plus discussion).
DANIÈLE WILMOUTH (1968, Pittsburgh) creates hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. Her films have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and on television worldwide, including at the Kunst Museum, Bonn, Germany; the National Gallery of Armenia; Television Canal+(a), Argentina; Kino Arsenal, Berlin, Germany; Tampere Short Film Festival, Finland; IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, Holland; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan. A retrospective of her work toured Russia in 2004. From 1990-96, Wilmouth lived in Japan, where she co-founded Hairless Film, an independent filmmaking collective. She also studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh under Katsura Kan, and performed with his troupe The Saltimbanques. Wilmouth is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most recently the 2010-2011 EMPAC Dance Movies Commission from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently on faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. More info at hairlessfilms.org.
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Have to Believe We Are Magic: Videos by Kent Lambert and Jesse McLean
Thursday, September 23, 6 p.m.
Kent Lambert and Jesse McLean in person!
- Still from “Magic for Beginners” (Jesse McLean, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.
By turns haunting and hilarious, the works of Chicago artists Kent Lambert and Jesse McLean remix the banal debris of television culture into striking meditations on our highly mediated public sphere. In Security Anthem (2003), Hymn of Reckoning (2006), and Sunset Coda (2006), Lambert culls footage from Lost, his own home movies, and the vocal stylings of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to explore the vagaries of national security in this current age of international terror. In her Bearing Witness trilogy, comprised of The Eternal Quarter Inch (2008), The Burning Blue (2009), and Somewhere Only We Know (2009), McLean considers the possibility for genuine human connection within a blur of televised emotion. This evening also features a brand-new collaboration between the two, as well as the North American premiere of McLean’s Magic for Beginners (2010), among others. Kent Lambert and Jesse McLean, 2003-10, USA, multiple formats, ca. 80 min (plus discussion).
KENT LAMBERT (1976, Colorado Springs, CO) lives and works in Chicago. His videos have been screened at festivals around the world and at such venues as Other Cinema in San Francisco and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His pop band Roommate will release its third album, titled Guilty Rainbow, in early 2011.
JESSE MCLEAN (1975, Philadelphia, PA) grew up in Pennsylvania, studied art at Oberlin College, and received her MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was the winner of the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Besides Ann Arbor, she has shown her work at the Venice Film Festival, Dallas VideoFest, San Francisco International Film Festival, Onion City Film and Video Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Migrating Forms at Anthology Film Archives, Art Chicago, PDX Festival, FLEX, and the Director’s Lounge in Berlin. She lives and works in Chicago, where she teaches part-time at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Rosa Menkman: Glitched
Thursday, September 30, 6 p.m
Rosa Menkman in person!
Every technology possesses its own inherent accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and theorist whose focus is on visual artifacts created by accidents in digital media specifically. She describes these as “the uncanny, brutal structures that come to the surface during a break of the flow within a technology; they are the primal data-screams of the machine.” Working at the experimental junction of glitch, noise, and new media art, Menkman creates glitch work and writes texts about codecs, interpolation, and compression going awry. This evening, Menkman will introduce a selection of videos followed by a real-time performance. Rest assured, the equipment is working, though it may not look like it is. This presentation coincides with GLI.TC/H, an international noise and new media conference taking place from September 29 to October 3 at various locations around Chicago. Visit http://gli.tc/h. Rosa Menkman, 2006–10, Netherlands, multiple formats, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).
ROSA MENKMAN (1983, Arnhem, Netherlands) is the leading international theory-practitioner of glitch art. She has written extensively on digital artifacts and noise, including the Glitch Studies Manifesto (2010). Her videos and real-time performances have been included in festivals like Blip, Europe and U.S.; Haip, Ljubljana; Cimatics, Brussels; Video Vortex, Amsterdam and Brussels; and Pasofest, Ankara. She has collaborated on art projects together with Alexander Galloway, little-scale, Govcom.org, Goto80 and the Internet art collective, Jodi.org. Menkman received her Master’s degree in 2009 and is currently a PhD student at KHM Cologne, writing on the subject of Artifacts.
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Bruce Bickford’s World
Thursday, October 7, 6 p.m.
Bruce Bickford in person!
- Bruce Bickford’s plasticine heads.
“Bruce Bickford is a genius!” — Frank Zappa
Enchanted gardens, epic battles, and creatures that morph out of roiling landscapes of clay are but a few of the visions that make up legendary animator Bruce Bickford’s world—one of metamorphosis, destruction, and regeneration. Best known for his work with Frank Zappa—Baby Snakes (1979) and The Amazing Mr. Bickford (1987)—Bickford’s stunning and surreal animations have influenced generations of artists, filmmakers, and musicians. This evening’s program features a rare theatrical screening of his 1988 tour-de-force, Prometheus’ Garden; recent pencil-line animations, including the hypnotic Inversion Layer (1994) and The Comic That Frenches Your Mind (2007); and a collection of rarely-seen animated sequences and fragments spanning Bickford’s prodigious career, featuring a not-to-be-missed live soundtrack by musicians Jeff Parker (Tortoise, The Relatives) and Frank Rosaly (Viscous). Special thanks to Peter Burr for his generous assistance with this program. Bruce Bickford, 1980-2010, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
BRUCE BICKFORD (1947, Seattle, WA) began animating clay in the summer of 1964 at the age of 17. He graduated from high school in 1965 and engaged in military service from 1966 to 1969. Upon his return, he resumed animation and began experimenting with line animation. He met Frank Zappa in 1973 and worked for him from 1974-1980, producing imagery for Baby Snakes (1979), The Dub Room Special (1985), Video From Hell (1980), and The Amazing Mr. Bickford (1987). Afterwards, he returned to Seattle and resumed animating, mostly his own personal work. His life and work were featured in the 2004 biographical documentary film, Monster Road, directed by Brett Ingram.
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Internal Systems: Films by Coleen Fitzgibbon
Thursday, October 14, 6 p.m.
Coleen Fitzgibbon in person!
- Still from “Internal System” (Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1974). Image courtesy the artist.
“…Brilliance waiting to be revisited.” — Holly Willis, LA Weekly
Between 1973 and 1975, Coleen Fitzgibbon, operating under the name “Colen Fitzgibbon,” produced a series of films that stand as some of cinema’s most rigorous explorations of the medium. Associated with the Structural film movement and New York’s No Wave scene, Fitzgibbon’s films emphasize time, duration, and their own flickering mechanics while also hinting at a deeper socio-cultural meaning. This evening, the SAIC alumna will present four of these films, including her 1974 standout, Internal System, whose recent restoration is attracting fresh acclaim. In the words of curator Andréa Picard, the film is “a vast, minimalist study of the monochromatic frame, a sort of sublime testing of film’s internal logic, its emulsive permutations and light sensitivities.” Also on the program: Fitzgibbon’s scratchy audio-visual collage Found Film Flashes (1974); the gorgeous FM/TRCS (1974) which uses the process of rephotography to transform the image of a woman dressing into abstract orbs of color and light; and the witty Restoring Appearances to Order (1974), featuring a short sequence of Fitzgibbon scrubbing a dirty sink to suggest the labor of art-making. Special thanks to Sandra Gibson for her generous assistance with this program. Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1973-75, USA, 16mm, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).
COLEEN FITZGIBBON (1950, Illinois) was active as an experimental film artist under the pseudonym “Colen Fitzgibbon” between the years 1973-1980. A student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Independent Study Program, she studied with Owen Land (aka “George Landow”), Stan Brakhage, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci, and worked on film projects for Dennis Oppenheim, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Les Levine. She formed the collaborative X+Y with Robin Winters in 1976, the Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince, and Winters in 1979 and is best known for co-founding the New York based Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab) in 1977, along with artists Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer, Liza Bear, Betsy Sussler, and Tom Otterness, among others. Fitzgibbon has screened her work at numerous international film festivals and museums, including the EXPRMNTL 5 at Knokke-Heist, Belgium; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Anthology Film Archives, Collective For Living Cinema, and Millennium Film Workshop, all New York City, and most recently at the Toronto Film Festival (2009) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Fitzgibbon currently resides in New York and Montana.
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Luis Gispert: Hyperreal
Thursday, October 21, 6 p.m.
Luis Gispert in person!
- Still from “Réne” (Luis Gispert, 2008). Image courtesy the artist.
In his dramatic photographic tableaux, sculptures, video vignettes, and short films, Miami-New York-based artist and SAIC alumnus Luis Gispert (BFA ’96) mashes up consumerist pop culture and narco-nouveau riche ‘80s aesthetics with Freudian nightmares and socio-economic provocation. Gispert, writes Edwin Stirman in Art in America, “aims for a new kind of baroque drama and satire by contrasting beauty and grotesquerie.” This evening, Gispert will provide an overview of this work in all mediums, including his 2008 film, Smother, and the multi-channel portrait, Réne (2008). Set in 1980s Miami, Smother follows the adolescent Waylon, boombox in tow, on a kaleidoscopic and macabre journey out of his overbearing mother’s clutches into a magical-realist nightmare world of his own making. Réne is an intimate, inventive study of family friend and Cuban émigré Réne as he goes about his daily routine in Miami Florida. Co-presented by Parlor Room, a visiting artist and lecture series created, run, budgeted and curated by graduate students in SAIC’s Photography Department. Luis Gispert, 2001-08, USA, multiple formats, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).
LUIS GISPERT (1972, Jersey City) creates art through a wide range of media, including photographs, film, sounds, and sculptures, touching upon hip-hop and youth culture, as well as Cuban-American history. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Art Pace, San Antonio, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; Palazzo Brocherasio in Turin; the Royal Academy in London; National Museum of Poznan, Poland; and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany. His works are in the collections of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received an MFA at Yale University in 2001 and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. From 1990-92, he attended Miami Dade College. He is represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, and Frederic Snitzer Gallery in Miami.
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Under the Cement, Sediment: Recent Video In and Around China
Thursday, October 28, 6 p.m.
Curator Pablo de Ocampo in person!
- Still from “Factory” (Chen Chieh-Jen, 2003). Image courtesy the artist.
In Yang Zhenzhong’s 2003 video Spring Story, a group of 1,500 employees at a Siemens factory recite an oft-cited line from a 1992 Deng Xiaoping speech: “A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too.” This speech is now seen as a milestone in the creation of China’s new hybrid economy, which embraces both socialist and free enterprise forces. Curated and introduced by Pablo de Ocampo, Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto, the works in this program examine the country’s recent political and economic transformations through its urban and industrial landscape. Additional pieces include Chen Chieh-Jen’s haunting Factory (2003), shot in an abandoned textile factory with its former employees re-enacting their work amidst the ruins; Oliver Husain’s Swivel (2005), which consists of a continuous panning shot of a hyper developed and glossy Shanghai; and Zhao Liang’s City Scene (2005), which captures street life in Beijing in a series of short vignettes. Multiple artists, 2003-05, Canada/China/Germany/Taiwan, multiple formats, ca. 90 min.
PABLO DE OCAMPO (1976, Phoenix, AZ) lives in Toronto, Canada, where he is the Artistic Director of the Images Festival, Canada’s largest platform for the exhibition of experimental and innovative film and video art practice. Prior to his post at Images, de Ocampo resided in Portland, Oregon, where co-founded the experimental film screening series Cinema Project and was the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center.
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Civil Status: Films by Alina Rudnitskaya
Thursday, November 4, 6:00 pm
Alina Rudnitskaya in person!
- Still from “Bitch Academy” (Alina Rudnitskaya, 2008). Image courtesy the artist.
Often absurd and occasionally shattering, Alina Rudnitskaya’s documentaries are tragicomic field notes on the bracing cultural and political changes of “New Russia.” Produced largely through the storied St. Petersburg Documentary Studio, her films examine the day-to-day lives of her fellow citizens while illuminating their aspirations for and fantasies about the future. This evening, in a rare U.S. appearance, Rudnitskaya presents three films from her award-winning body of work. In Bitch Academy (2008), she follows a group of women who go back to school to become “strong women” by learning to seduce millionaire sugar daddies. Some revel in the school’s provocative hands-on lessons while others grimly choke back tears—only hinting at the troubles they hope to escape—as they struggle to master this new form of empowerment. In Civil Status (2005), Rudnitskaya observes the everyday drama of work at the Civil Registry office, where the ladies-only staff transforms the joy, fury, and grief of new brides, divorcing husbands, and recent widows into bureaucratic procedure. And, in Besame Mucho (2006) she sketches an intimate portrait of an amateur choir in rural Tikhvin as they rehearse for group of Italian diplomats. In Russian with English subtitles. Alina Rudnitskaya, 2005-08, Russia, 35mm and Beta SP video, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
ALINA RUDNITSKAYA (1976, Zaozernyj, Russian Federation) is a director and scriptwriter. She received a degree from the Academy of Aerospace Engineering, St. Petersburg in 1997 and studied film directing at St. Petersburg’s University of Culture and Arts from 1997-2001. Her short films, largely produced through the renowned St. Petersburg Documentary Studio, have garnered over thirty international awards prizes and have screened worldwide, including at the Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands; International Film Festival Vila do Conde, Portugal; Documentamadrid, Spain; the London Film Festival, UK; Transmediale, Berlin, Germany; and Silverdocs, Maryland, USA; among many others. She lives and works in St. Petersburg.
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Erie
Thursday, November 11, 6 p.m.
Kevin Jerome Everson in person!
- Still from “Erie” (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2010).
Over the past thirteen years, Kevin Jerome Everson has crafted an exquisite—and prodigious—body of work on the working-class culture of African-Americans and people of African descent. Combining documentary and fiction, Everson’s nearly 70 shorts and four features center on everyday tasks and gestures to unearth and illuminate the ordinary grace of daily life. This evening, in conjunction with the Video Data Bank’s release of the 25-title DVD box set, Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, the artist presents his acclaimed feature Erie (2010) along with a handful of new shorts. Unspooling in a series of hand-held, single-take shots filmed in the urban centers around the great lake, Erie captures the conversation of former General Motors workers as the plant is about to close; hospital employees carefully sorting and sterilizing surgical implements; and young performers krumping and rehearsing musical theater side-by-side, the camera moving between them in a kind of mash-up-en-scene and microcosm of the rich and multifaceted operation of the film as a whole. Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. Kevin Jerome Everson, 2010, USA, HDCAM video, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
KEVIN JEROME EVERSON (1965, Mansfield, OH) has made four feature-length films and nearly seventy shorts. He received an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. His films and artwork have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; Wurttenbergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; the Spaces Gallery, Cleveland; the American Academy of Rome, Italy; the Sundance Film Festival; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Cinematexas; Ann Arbor Film Festival; and Chicago Underground Film Festival, among many others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy Rome Prize, and residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Colony. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Reenactments
Thursday, November 18, 6 p.m.
Curator Irina Botea in person!
- Still from “Post-Mortem Dialogue With Ceauşescu” (Ion Grigorescu, 2007). Image courtesy the artist.
“Artistic reenactments do not ask…what really happened…instead, they ask what the images we see might mean concretely to us” — Inke Arns
Artistic reenactments do not aim to affirm or glorify the past, but rather to examine an event’s relevance in the present. They call into question our very understanding of this present—along with its social, political and cultural potential. This program, curated by artist and SAIC faculty member Irina Botea, proposes a trajectory of reenactment that cycles through highly mediated events and famous works of art, from a propaganda film made by the Romanian secret police in 1959 to Sharon Hayes’s Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds (2003), in which the artist attempts to recite from memory Patty Hearst’s infamous tapes to her parents after being kidnapped in 1974. Also featuring work by Ion Grigorescu, Ciprian Muresan, Mathew Paul Jinks, Kerry Tribe, and Artur Żmijewski, among others. Multiple artists, 1959-2010, Poland/Romania/USA, multiple formats, ca. 75 min.
IRINA BOTEA (1970, Ploiesti, Romania) is a visual artist, whose works combine cinema verite and direct cinema with reenactment strategies, auditions, and rehearsals. She received a BFA and MFA from Bucharest University of Arts in 2001 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Solo and group shows include: National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Paris; Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid; Gwangju Biennale 2010; U -Turn Quadriennial, Copenhagen; 51st Venice Biennale; Prague Bienale; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Casa Encendida, Madrid; Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria; Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels; Artefact Festival, Leuven; Rotterdam Film Festival; HMKV Halle, Dortmund; Casino de Luxembourg; Kunstforum, Vienna; Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; MNAC (National Museum of Contemporary Art), Bucharest; Museum of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland; and Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowki Castle, Warsaw. She resides in Chicago.
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The Unstable Object
Thursday, December 2, 6 p.m.
Daniel Eisenberg in person!
- Still from “The Unstable Object” (Daniel Eisenberg, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.
“Daniel Eisenberg’s films construct intricate webs of associations and reflections that probe consciousness, memory, and the emotional undercurrents of landscapes.” – Steve Anker
What do a luxury automobile, a wall clock, and a cymbal have in common? Daniel Eisenberg’s latest film, The Unstable Object is an elegant and visually sensual essay on contemporary models of production. Interested in the ways “things” affect both producer and consumer, Eisenberg travels to a state-of-the-art Volkswagen factory in Dresden, Germany, where shoppers look on as their individualized cars are hand-built by high-tech specialists; to Chicago Lighthouse Industries, where blind workers produce wall clocks for federal government offices; and to a deafening cymbal factory in Istanbul, Turkey, where today’s most sought-after cymbals are cast and hammered by hand, exactly as they were 400 years ago. Through a series of sequences sympathetic to each site and subject, The Unstable Object probes the relationships our global economy creates between individuals around the world. This special preview screening will be followed by a book signing for POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (Black Dog Publishing, 2010), the first major critical study of the SAIC professor’s work. Daniel Eisenberg, 2010, Germany/Turkey/USA, DigiBeta video, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
DANIEL EISENBERG (1954, Israel) has been making films for the past three decades. His films and videos examine history, memory, trauma, the contemporary urban environment, and labor, as well as their manifold representation and mediation. His work has been shown throughout Europe and North America, with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; De Unie, Rotterdam; and Kino Arsenal, Berlin; and at film festivals in Berlin, Sydney, London, and Jerusalem. Eisenberg has also edited numerous television documentaries, including Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, and Vietnam: A Television History. Eisenberg has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. His films are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, and the Australian Film and Television School, among others. He is currently Professor of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
