The images here are adapted from experimental tools used in psychological studies spanning several decades. Against these faces and face-like things, an abstract text imagines a perspective floating somewhere between test subject and researcher.
Organizer:
Mike Newton is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. His work is (usually) about finding bits of human subjectivity at the intersections of complex and generally-incompatible systems or ideologies. He’s an editor and contributing writer for the arts magazine Secret Behavior, and a regular contributor to NYC-based progressive newspaper The Indypendent. He is not to be confused with another Mike Newton who lives nearby.
During his thirty-year-plus career, Vito Ricci has scored over fifty productions including concert music, theater, dance, performance, film and video. His collaborative works include partnerships with Bob Holman, Martin Goldray, Rashied Ali, Flux Quartet, Jacob Burkhardt, Lise Vachon, and The Woster Group. Performances of his works have been produced at The Skyball Theater, The Public Theater, Greenwich Music House, Cooper Union, Roulette, The Knitting Factory, St. Marks Church, The Performing Garage, the Walker Arts Center and the Southern Theater, both in Minneapolis, and the Sedgwick Cultural Center in Philadelphia.
Night Visions developed as an audio/visual conversation about sleep cycles, psychic energy and synesthesia. The result is a haunting spell of color and rhythm.
Organizer:
Zoe Kirk-Gushowaty is an artist working experimentally with moving image and sound. She works primarily with 16mm and 8mm film incorporating live elements of sound and performance in exhibition. Her work has been presented in Canada, USA, Europe and Japan. Zoe is a founding member of the Iris Film Collective in Vancouver, Canada.
Images from dreams,
bloom amid restless movements,
a sleeping portrait.
Organizers:
Stephanie Gould, originally from Melbourne, Australia is a visual artist with a special emphasis on photography and filmmaking. Her recent work in particular focuses on documentary, music and movement.
Brighid Greene is a freelance performer with a background in dance, a tendency towards live performance, and an affinity for film.
+ TWO ARIES / SUPER 8MM DOUBLE PROJECTION & EXPANDED CINEMA / JOSH WEISSBACH (EAST HADDAM, CONNECTICUT)
Two Aries that are simultaneously the same and different.
Organizer:
Josh Weissbach is an American experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house next to an abandoned village in Moodus, Connecticut with his wife, daughter, and three cats. His cinematic practice primarily focuses on the relationship between the intimate and the uncanny within domestic spaces. Central to this process is an investigation of the visual agency of the (un)built form and the manner in which it implicates a history of familial trauma. His practice also considers natural spaces that are defined by the vitality of matter and its transfer of force.
His 16mm films and digital videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, Berlin International Directors Lounge, Antimatter Underground Film Festival, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, Experiments in Cinema, and Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner. He has won jury prizes at Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival.
He is the recipient of the 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a 2015 LEF Fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.
Second Star is a sound performance for moving image mechanics. Black and white text is laser-printed onto clear 16mm film, assembled into loops and translated into rhythm and tone by an analog projector. Photographic tradition is eschewed in favour of something invested neither in abstraction nor representation, reimagining the potential for an obsolete technology.
Organizer:
S.F. is a visual artist (Libra) from YWG, whose film and video work has screened at underground festivals and marginalized venues worldwide. He studied film theory and production at the University of Manitoba, and began conducting lo-fi moving image experiments in 2010. Primarily a filmmaker, also invested in photography, re-photography, kaleidoscope and collage.
Reflectors is the result of an all new collaboration between Sam Hoolihan, John Marks, and Crystal Myslajek. The work creates a resonant synthesis of vertically structured film and sound. The images are composed of double and triple exposed Plus X, Tri X, and Ektachrome 16mm film stocks, by layering images on top of one another multiple contexts resolve within single frames. The sounds, in response to the film, are constructed of live-looped vocal and keyboard passages that are supported and processed by modular synthesizer building textures that take on a topographical form.
Organizers:
Sam Hoolihan is a Minneapolis-based visual artist and teacher blending photography, film/video, and performance. His films have screened in Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Sam has been a resident artist at Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Art of This Gallery in Minneapolis, MN. He is co-founder of MirrorLab, a studio, film lab, and project space for explorations in integrated art forms. Sam is currently teaching handmade cinema and media arts at both MCAD and the University of Minnesota in 2015.
John Marks is a Minneapolis-based artist, performer, and curator working at the intersections of media, music, and visual art. John’s work has been presented at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Mono No Aware Vlll (Brooklyn), Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Slamdance (Park City Utah), Minneapolis / St. Paul International Film Festival, Cellular Cinema (Minneapolis), Roman Susan Gallery (Chicago), and Northern Spark (MN). He served as co-curator of The Soap Factory’s 2013 Minnesota Biennial, The Tuesday Improvised Music Series, and co-founded Art of This Gallery, and MirrorLab (Twin Cities).
Crystal Myslajek is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who writes and performs accompaniment for post-modern dance, performance and film. In her work she blends looping, ethereal vocals, and effects with minimalism, classical piano, and pop. In January 2015 she performed new multimedia compositions commissioned by the Cedar Cultural Center’s 416 Club. Myslajek’s improvisational piano work was featured on a limited-edition-vinyl release as part of the Soap Factory’s 2013 Minnesota Biennial. Myslajek was lead vocalist and bass guitarist in the critically acclaimed art-rock trio, Brute Heart, whose music was featured in Doug Aitken’s Station to Station project in 2013. With Brute Heart, she was awarded City Pages’ Best Female Vocalist, commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose and perform a film score for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and released recordings for the Soft Abuse, M’Lady’s, Moon Glyph and Water Wing labels.
“I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may have already told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told.” – Italo Calvino
Culled from a period of life during which the experience of time ceaselessly expands and contracts, when a day can feel a lifetime and a year little more than a train ride. An ongoing project, a living work; something like a notebook in which I am just as likely to draw a picture as to tear out a page. Films and photographs I’ve collected over the past seven years, abstractions, byproducts of process, accidents, animations, notes, sketches, essays, poems, doubts and dreams; almost entirely camera originals. A celebration of the everyday, of the capacity for vision. An invitation to appreciate the beauty and pathos of the seemingly mundane. Multiple projections, manipulated and performed with a live score, moving with the music, this piece allows each moment the weight I feel it deserves. It is my song.
Organizers:
Craig Scheihing is a filmmaker, photographer, curator, educator, and the founder of Big Mama’s Cinematheque; based in Philadelphia and working freely between diary, essay, and abstract forms. His films have been screened in film festivals, basements, bars, batting cages, galleries, and garages both in the U.S. and internationally.
Christian Bach is a Philadelphia based drummer and percussionist. He has performed in a variety of musical settings since 2008 – most notably as a founding member of the grind project Congenital Death.
Justin Fox is a Philadelphia based musician. A current and past member of Kite Party, Queen Jesus, Spirit of the Beehive, and Cherry, Justin is most interested in guitar work that is textural, lyrical, and simple.
Kevin P. Keenan VIII is a carpenter and experimental musician based out of North Philadelphia. Since 2008, he has been writing and performing with two-piece experimental rock band The Joint Chiefs of Math.
Jesse Kennedy is a musician, photographer, and filmmaker living and working in Philadelphia.
Kian Sorouri is a musician based in Philadelphia.
Gabby Eisenhower is a witch and musician living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She plays in the band Marge and makes simple solo songs on her computer.
+ SATURDAY DJ SETS / DJ BRUCE (INTER-PROGRAM) & SAL PRINCIPATO / LIQUID LIQUID (AFTER PARTY)
Sal Principato is the vocalist for Liquid Liquid, the New York City post-punk, post-disco band, originally active from 1980 to 1983. Since reforming in 2008, the band has played a select number of shows including opening for the LCD Soundsystem farewell show at Madison Square Garden. Sal produces remixes and often tours as a DJ.
Inspired by hometown heroes DJ Excel and DJ Jazzy Jeff, DJ Bruce found his way to a pair of turntables his sophomore year of university in Philadelphia. Since then, he has allowed his authentic musical tastes to take front-and-center of his journey. From his first Philly nightclub residency at 19 to remixing for independent tastemakers such as A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold Records and Young Robots, he quickly earned a reputation for his work ethic and tight groove. Since relocating to New York in the Spring of 2013, Bruce has been a key member of Razor-N-Tape, a purist Brooklyn vinyl/digital label and has produced disco and boogie edits under the umbrella of “STRONG Edits” that have made their way from the web to the dancefloor. He considers himself fortunate enough to have held residencies across multiple boroughs, perform on both coasts, and take on the role of music director at Brooklyn cocktail lounge favorite: Donna. Armed with his open format approach to djaying, Bruce has been able to successfully traverse worlds ranging from velvet ropes to the sweaty dance floors of the underground.
