+ GANZFELD TEST / 16 MM MULTI-PROJECTION INSTALLATION & INTERACTIVE SCULPTURE / AMANDA LONG (NEW YORK, NEW YORK)
GANZFELD TEST is an immersive color space experience for one or two spectators at a time. Color fields and flicker films fill a cinema that covers the viewer’s upper body, surrounding the head completely with light. A ganzfeld is a uniform visual field – akin to standing in a blizzard that obscures the horizon – where the sky and the land become one and the viewer’s sense of depth is lost. This installation utilizes a 360-degree infinite film loop environment of pulsating color fields to create a similar disorienting effect.
Organizer:
Amanda Long is a sculptor investigating light, color, perception and human behavior. Her work has been exhibited at Bring to Light Nuit Blanche NYC, the Dumbo Arts Festival, the Mattress Factory Museum, and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. She received a MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 and a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. Her kinetic video sculpture, Lighter and Lighter, was the recipient of the University Film and Video Association’s Carole Fielding Grant 2010. Presently Amanda lives and works in Long Island City, NY.
+ B-90 NOIR / 16 MM SINGLE PROJECTION & LIVE MIX OF RADIO WAVES / JOHNNY RODGERS (BINGHAMPTON, NEW YORK)
B-90 NOIR is inspired by Hiroshi Teshigarhara’s The Woman in the Dunes, a film about confinement and escape. B-90 NIOR attempts to turn away from film as a document of an event by producing a field of unscripted encounters. Here is a visual and sonic provocation, an invitation, into the liminal, the always transitional.
Organizer:
Johnny Rodgers is a graduate student in upstate New York studying Cultural Anthropology and Cinema.
+ FRANCESCA WOODMAN’S AUNTS / 16 MM SINGLE PROJECTION & LIVE VOICE-OVER WITH TWO MEGAPHONES / ELINA BROTHERUS (HELSINKI, FINLAND)
Two photographers are working to make a self-portrait with a large-format view camera. They pay homage to Francesca Woodman, who for her age could be their niece.
Organizer:
Elina Brotherus (b. 1972 Helsinki, Finland), works in photography, video and film. Her current work is centered on the relation of the human figure and landscape, and on the gaze of an artist on his/her model. Among her recent solo exhibitions feature Bloomberg SPACE, London ; The Wapping Project – Bankside, London ; gb agency, Paris (2010) and The National Art Center, Tokyo (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Lianzhou Photography Festival, China ; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2012) ; MAXXI, Rome ; ARTER, Istanbul (2010) ; Brooklyn Museum (2007) ; Biennale of Sydney (2006). She was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Photography in 2008, the French Prix Niépce in 2005, and the Scandinavian Carnegie Art Award’s Young Artist’s Stipendium in 2003. She was shortlisted for the Ars Fennica Prize 2007 and for the Citibank Photography Prize (now Deutsche Börse Photography Prize) in 2002.
Brotherus has published four monographs: Artist and her Model (Le Caillou bleu, Brussels 2012), Études d’après modèle, danseurs (Les éditions Textuel, Paris 2007), The New Painting (Next Level, London 2005), Decisive Days (Kustannus Pohjoinen, Oulu 2002).
Cemented technology, the figure connected to the floor attempts to play a mangled VHS into the mix. Transforming objects beyond function, this piece explores how to un-build concrete, ground up: from black and white images to the motion they stir. Though the films are mute, the things on which they project absorb light & digest into sound.
Organizer:
Masha Mitkov was born in Odessa, Ukraine shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, after which her family found asylum in Portland, Oregon. While studying for a BA in Mathematics at Bard College, she fell in love with 16mm film and analog motion picture techniques. While her mathematical practice could be used to program roaming digital projector robots, she prefers the spiral of successive still frames.
+ WHERE’S THE CHILD? / SUPER 8 MM MULTI-PROJECTIONS + 35 MM SLIDE PROJECTIONS & LIVE THEATER, DANCE, AND VOODOO / JOEY HUERTAS AKA JANE PUBLIC AND SUZANA STANKOVIC (NEW YORK, NEW YORK)
WHERE’S THE CHILD is a performance that will reveal the trauma involved in high conflict divorce and parental alienation tactics. Live voodoo and false allegations will be used to visually demonstrate how parents and children can be systematically used as weapons of destruction against one another, despite any loving relationship history surrounding the original family composition.
Organizers:
Joey Huertas aka Jane Public is an experimental film and performance artist who works in line with the direct, observational and reconstruction movements of documentary work. His creative works take many forms, including interpretation stories arranged by peculiar/imagined biographies for fictitious persons. Critics have cited his work as representing a new kind of social activism using transgressive biographies. The artist is also a clinical social worker who integrates the healing process into art.
Suzana Stankovic is a modern dancer, choreographer and performance artist based in New York. She is classically trained in ballet and is an avant-garde performance artist who has collaborated with various international dance schools, films and has choreographed many of her original works. She does not just “move” her body, she “speaks” with her body.
+ THE BIRDS OF CHERNOBYL / 16 MM DUAL-PROJECTION & LIVE MIX OF CASSETE RECORDINGS, FIELD RECORDINGS AND ELECTROMAGNETIC AMPLIFACATION OF PROJECTOR MOTOR / MARGARET RORISON (BALTIMORE, MARYLAND)
THE BIRDS OF CHERNOBYL is an ode to Harry Bennett, the artist’s 93-year-old grandfather. Harry made a living as a painter for Gothic and Romance novels in the 60s & 70s and is now living with dementia. He spent much of his life as a solitary man, committing himself to walking, philosophizing and creating. This piece incorporates their shared love for reflection amid landscape. The 16mm footage was shot during a residency in The Ozarks. The audio accompaniment of this piece incorporates recordings of Harry Bennett, field recordings of oilrigs and fishing wire in a Louisiana bayou, and live amplification of the projector’s motor using both contact microphones and electromagnetic pick-ups.
Organizer:
Margaret Rorison is an artist working and living in Baltimore, Maryland. She works in variety of mediums including, 16mm film, video, photography and sound. Her work develops from extensive walks through rural and urban landscapes, combining moving images, field recordings and text. She is interested in the live dialogue between music and film and often projects her films accompanying sound artists. She holds an MFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art and is the co-founder of an experimental film series, Sight Unseen and is also a member of The Red Room Collective.
WILL O’ THE WISP is a multi-disciplinary performance devised by Holus Bolus to explore the relationship between home and self-identity and is based on research into the events surrounding the slow destruction of a small town in Pennsylvania. Centralia, PA was an active anthracite coal mining community until the 1960s when an abandoned coal deposit caught fire. In the following decades the government and community struggled to decide Centralia’s future. It was eventually evacuated due to the toxic gasses expelled by the subterranean fire, wafting from the very same hills on which the town was founded. In creating ‘Will o’ the Wisp’, Holus Bolus desires to provide audiences with an immersive transcendence through the integration of film with potent ensemble dance and vocal performances.
Organizers:
Holus Bolus is a collective dedicated to devising environments that lead an audience beyond the passive experience of sight and sound. (CONCEPT, DIRECTION, FILM)
Katie Fleming is a theatre artist and founder of the collective Holus Bolus. Her work has spanned traditional and experimental theater as well as film and events. For the past several years she worked on the build and run of Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More” and is currently assistant directing Mikhael Garver of The New Ensemble. She studied devised theatre internationally holds a BA in Technical Theatre and Dramaturgy from Emerson College. (CONCEPT AND DIRECTION)
Sean Hanley is filmmaker and member of Holus Bolus pursuing experiments in the documentary genre. His work has screened in various film festivals across the United States and Canada, including the Athens Film + Video Festival (Ohio) and the Black Maria Film & Video Festival. For the past two years, he’s been a staff member for the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. He holds a BFA in Film Production from Emerson College. (FILM)
Charlie Adams is a British singer, vocal coach, teaching artist and harpist from London. She attended the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, founded by Sir Paul McCartney. During her time at the institute, she joined Sense of Sound, a professional choir that works throughout the UK and Europe, in which had the opportunity to collaborate with an array of artists and musicians, including: Brian Eno, Ringo Starr, Damon Albarn, Russel Watson and Imogen Heap. In 2010 she co-founded MultiVOX, a community arts and vocal training organization based in the Northwest of England. In February 2012, Charlie relocated to NYC where she coordinates and directs ‘The Britpop Choir’ and is in the process of developing an American branch of MultiVOX. (VOCAL COMPOSITION)
Movement Workshop Group, co-founded by Leslie Guyton, creates distinct dance theatre that not only provide an evening of entertainment but also provoke thought and lift the audience to a higher more inspired psychic state. They hold classes in Brooklyn and have received many grants and residencies as a NY based company of five years. Rachel Garis, choreographer founder of Jacob Garis Dance Theater, is a multidisciplinary artist and performer based in New York City. She has danced internationally in Ponderosa Tanzland Festival (GE) and project, 100 Dancers in Copenhagen with Live Art Installations. Movement Workshop has been awarded the APAP CEF grant to attend the International Tanzmesse, the Planet Connections Theater Festivity Artists grant, The Filed;s Field Artist residency and has presented work as part of La MaMa Moves (Manhattan). The ensemble includes: Matt Bovee, Sara Dobrinich, Kevin Jones, Laura Murphy, Angel Ortiz, Benjamin Robert, Carrie Walsh, & Samantha Owens. (ENSEMBLE MOVEMENT)
Jahiliyya Fields performs a live set including tracks from this year’s 2 X LP release UNICURSAL HEXAGRAM (L.I.E.S.)
“L.I.E.S. boldly go where most other House labels wouldn’t dare, presenting an excellent LP of cosmic synth music with religious overtones conceived by Matt Morandi aka Jahiliyya Fields. It’s one of the label’s most substantial releases to date, and not only by length. The music itself is of a wholly more gratifying calibre than their usual – albeit excellent and unconventional – dancefloor releases, drawing upon a wealth of exploratory synth music and symbology fro Islam and Thelema to set the mind off on more spiritual, intellectually nourishing forays. From a Terry Riley-like ascension/immersion ‘Servant Garden’, ‘Ocean Mom’ melts into therapeutic new age drone and noise washes, while bass rhythms creep into the equation with the throbbing arpeggios of ‘Air On Earth’, and the oscillating flux of ‘Water Breaker’. A soundtrack to Steve Cossman’s ‘White Cabbage’ returns us skyward with ecstatic propulsion, and the conclusive ‘AAAAA’ kneads and weaves tangy synth discord and frothing pulses into a starry hammock” – boomkat (Manchester, UK)
