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BEN RUSSELL : REBUS — Opening Reception — Saturday May 7th, 2010, 5-9pm

5 May, 2011 by

1716 S Morgan #2F Chicago, IL 60608
May 7, 2011 – June 19, 2011
Opening reception: Saturday 5-9 pm, May 7th, 2011

Private viewings by appointment*
*The Presentation Theme (14:00, 16mm, 2008) by Jim Trainor will be projected twice during the opening reception.

About the show:
“XQQQQME Dear Friend, but your FAMILYYYYYY at BEN RUSSELL sure is feeling a bit FAREDCE! We usually have TIMING TI MING in bringing you, TIME TIME, the finest of the fine arts, but for some reason we got LAL in putting together this month’s 5-person exhibition — BENRUSSELL : REBUS! While putting this show together hasn’t been a P WALK ARK, but believe us when we say that the line-up is M1LLION — an SYMPHON that has finally been completed, that LOV that you dream of at night. We’re  getting ahead of ourselves, though — we should really TAKE PETS and remind you, Dear Friend, what it is we’re getting on about.

BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is art-word and art-puzzle made manifest! From Lewis Carroll to Egyptian hieroglyphs to the British game of Concentration to your older brother’s collection of Lone Star Beer bottle caps, BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is yet another move forward in wo/man’s eternal quest to arrive at symbolic meaning through pictogrammatic signification! With the ever-clarifying but perpetually complicating metaphoric powers of art at our ready, we call upon you to venture in/out of that great unknown we call Meaning with naught but a Wi-Fi trail marker as guidepost for your deeply personal inner quest (ARCTANDER). Your path, as it were, will be bound by strange lines and drops of blood (TRAINOR), it will lead you to a painted cave wall of glyphs and symbols (PRICE) and an outcropping of transformative image-combinations (MOSK), at which point your world will rotate entirely. That thrum of voice and hum of light will settle upon your head, echoing out from smaller-cave to skull and back, an HD image-sound cipher (KNEZEVIC) cracked by your own delicate puzzle of eyes and ears.

So good it must be SICKBIRD, so affecting it’s like a punch IRIGHTI, this is proof positive that art and BEN RUSSELL : REBUS are PPOD — come on down and see for yourself!

About the Artists:
ZAK ARCTANDER is a Chicago based artist who makes sculptures, videos, and photographs. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010. He works as an Artist Guide at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is an assistant at Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park.

IKA KNEZEVIC is a Serbian artist based in Chicago. Her work occurs in various program-making media, physical objects and moving images. Current areas of research are: secrets, involuntary movement, dream-wreck, liquidity, topical and tropical disasters, downward spirals, bright lights, vibratory inscription, record making, dude art, double dude art, forensic exhibition models, Germany’s infatuation with minimalism and shit.

SARAH MOSK was born in 1978. Lives in Pilsen, Chicago, USA. Has a BFA from Northern Illinois University.

CARMEN PRICE‘s drawings create new relationships between familiar visual elements to express joy in contemporary culture. His celebratory works use personal symbolism and a strong faith in the accidental to form occasionally narrative and often confusing scenes. Originally from Kansas City, Price currently lives and works in Chicago.

JIM TRAINOR is a filmmaker, mostly an animator, living in Chicago. He is just now completing a series of films called The Animals and their Limitations, of which Harmony is the latest installment, with The Bat and the Virgin, The Bats, The Moschops and The Magic Kingdom its predecessors. Most recently, he has been working on a long comic strip project called Sun Shames Headhunting Moon. Jim Trainor teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About the Space:
BEN RUSSELL is an art space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.  Co-curated by artists Brandon Alvendia and Ben Russell and situated around the front two rooms in the apartment of its namesake, BEN RUSSELL began presenting a series of month-long 5-person shows on Memorial Day Weekend in the year 2009.  Participating artists are invited to produce and exhibit work that is in accordance with the title/theme of each show, the name of which will be derived entirely from the 10 letters in the words “ben russell.”  Future shows may include BEN RUSSELL : LENS, BEN RUSSELL : REBELS, and BEN RUSSELL : US.  In keeping with the structural conceits of the French Oulipo language group and the spatial and material limits of what is effectively a rented apartment, BEN RUSSELL maintains a strict set of restrictions for all exhibiting artists by which:

  • One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work scaled at a minimum of three quarters of the thirteen by ten foot wall.
  • One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work at a maximum of one half of the opposing wall space between the two adjacent doors.
  • One artist shall produce a time-based work to be presented via a CRT flat screen monitor (and associated components) with Dolby 5.1 audio in the adjacent screening room.
  • One artist shall produce work to be installed in the all-weather sculpture garden.
  • One artist shall produce work to be performed for the duration of 15-30 minutes during the opening.


BEN RUSSELL features a rotating roster of Chicago-based and non-Chicago-based artists and will be open for viewings one night a month and by appointment, as needed.”

–
www.dimeshow.com

 

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Space Program: MARS, or War Huh Yeah What Is It Good For Absolutely Nothing Say It Again, 5/1/2011

29 April, 2011 by

Crossroads by Bruce Conner (36:00, 16mm, 1976)

SPACE PROGRAM presents
“MARS, or War Huh Yeah What Is It Good For Absolutely Nothing Say It Again”

Sunday the 1st of May at 7:30pm
at Thalia Hall, 1807 S Allport, Chicago, IL (map)
$5 suggested donation
this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, etc
curated by Ben Russell

**this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, etc

“ Oh, rust-surfaced sphere, with your receding polar ice caps and optical illusion canals!  If not for your half-mass, your eccentric orbit, and your global dust storms, we would call you sister or cousin; but it was your fiery red-lit temperament and your thin atmosphere that led the Romans to name you after their God of War, and we at SPACE PROGRAM shall do the same.  We shall land our newest craft upon the peak of your Olympus Mons, and from that vantage point (highest in the solar system) we shall survey the entire galaxy stretched out before us.  Unlike the 2/3rds of failed Mars voyages that left before us, we shall traverse your Valles Marineris with the understanding that the power of Mars as the power of War is a power best used to secure the peace.  Our childhood wargames (Geissler/Sann), our damaged soldiers (Single Spark Film Collective), our flicker destruction (Sharits), our media paralysis (Smith), and our transcendent explosions (Conner) are herewith submitted as evidence.  With a question on our lips we shall raise our flag upon your soil, its single dollar/Euro sign fluttering in the solar wind: Oh, Mars – if it costs $309,000 per kilogram to land upon your basalt surface, what (pray tell) is the average cost of peace? ” — BR

FEATURING:
Fuck the War by Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann (4:00, video, 2007)
Winter Soldier by Single Spark Film Collective (20:00, 16mm, 1971)
T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G by Paul Sharits (12:00, 16mm, 1968)
Frozen War by John Smith (11:00, video, 2002)
Friendly Fire by Thorsten Fleisch (7:30, 16mm, 2003)
Crossroads by Bruce Conner (36:00, 16mm on video, 1976)
TRT 90:00

***
MARS PROGRAMME DETAILS
Fuck the War by Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann (4:00, video, 2007)
The film is, on the one hand, a con­tem­po­rary Lord of the Flies, which evokes the ongo­ing sense­less­ness of vio­lence and war, bring­ing the mes­sage home by allow­ing Ger­man (rather than Iraqi or Sierra Leonese) chil­dren to explore the giddy chaos of mil­i­tary power. At the same time, it speaks to the innate instincts and prim­i­tive impulses that remain only shal­lowly buried beneath our civ­i­lized surfaces.

Winter Soldier by Single Spark Film Collective (20:00, 16mm, 1971)
Vietnam vets give testimony at the Winter Soldier tribunals. Vet after vet talks about what he personally experienced in Vietnam, what he was made to do as a soldier in an imperialist army. Revealed by nightmarish firsthand account are the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese people.

T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. by Paul Sharits (1969)

T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G by Paul Sharits (12:00, 16mm, 1968)
“Merges violence with purity.” – P. Adams Sitney

Frozen War by John Smith (11:00, video, 2002)
A disorientating experience while attempting to watch the TV news in an Irish hotel room triggers a spontaneous response to the bombing of Afghanistan.

Friendly Fire by Thorsten Fleisch (7:30, 16mm, 2003)
… Friendly Fire (2003) literally burned what you could see, and it was the light of the fire, the projector’s beam, that played out in stunning violence onscreen. With so much attention dedicated to the preservation of film, FriendlyFire proposed a cathartic alternative: ruined figures of melted celluloid and crackling ash. in death film comes alive, more vital, reborn by the very forces that destroy it. (Genevieve Yue ‘Senses of Cinema’)

Crossroads by Bruce Conner (1976)

Crossroads by Bruce Conner (36:00, 16mm, 1976)
The 1945 atomic-bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll becomes a thing of terrible beauty and haunting visual poetry when shown in extreme slow motion, shown from 27 different angles, and accompanied by avant-garde Western classical music composed for electric organ by Terry Riley.
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Space Program: Venus, aka Lover’s Rock, Sunday, 4/24/11

22 April, 2011 by

All Through the Night (2008) by Michael Robinson

SPACE PROGRAM presents
“Venus, aka Lover’s Rock — A Name That Serves As Exclamation For Us All”

Sunday the 24th of April at 7:30pm
at Thalia Hall, 1807 S Allport, Chicago, IL (map)
$5 suggested donation
this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, etc
curated by Mary Helena Clark & Ben Russell

“ After our perilous maiden voyage to Mercury, SPACE PROGRAM‘s co-pilot/curator Mary Helena Clark cordially invites you to crash-land your spacecraft onto the terrestrial planet Venus, that inhospitable rock with its reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, that glowing orb your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents so wisely named after the Roman goddess of Love and Beauty.  Today’s Venus finds its mirror in that 90s rave-haunt-cum-cinema-space called Thalia Hall, a space transformed again and again through eight moving images of longing and musical transcendence: a veritable cinema mixtape featuring tracks by Cyndi Lauper, The Shangri-las, Hoagy Lands, The Kinks, Jonathan Halper, Glass Crash and the dance beats of England’s finest 90s club music.

Lovers Rock!  This party is for you and you and you and, as such, Alex Hubbard is there to welcome you at the door of your new CINEPOLIS.  You’ll find Michael Robinson just inside, asking Venus the self-same question ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT: “What is beauty?”  Chick Strand’s ELASTICITY and Laida Lertxundi’s MY TEARS ARE DRY shout answers from the living room with meditations on longing, euphoria and ecstasy.  Later on, Lertxundi escapes outside for some fresh air, wanders into the volcanic horizon and stakes claim to a desert outpost in FOOTNOTES TO THE HOUSE OF LOVE — after all, there’s no rainfall on Venus. Back inside, we share a PUCE MOMENT or two with Kenneth Anger — all glitter and glamour and greyhound, an early indicator of just how British club-and-rave this party is going to get (courtesy of Mark Leckey’s FIORUCCI MADE ME HARDCORE). The music rises, you dance and dance and get caught up in that Crystal Lite high of Shana Moulton’s WHISPERING PINES 8 until finally the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere makes your head throb and you run into a corner to empty yourself out entirely.  Through bleary-eyes you think to yourself, “The surface of Venus sort of looks like Hell” and as you vomit brightness underneath so many toxic clouds, you realize that this planet really is a metaphor for love as well.”

Featuring: Cinepolis by Alex Hubbard (1:55, video, 2007), All Through the Night by Michael Robinson (4:20, video, 2008), Elasticity by Chick Strand (22:00, 16mm, 1975), My Tears Are Dry by Laida Lertxundi (4:00, 16mm, 2009), Footnotes to the House of Love by Laida Lertxundi (13:00, 16mm, 2007), Puce Momentby Kenneth Anger (6:30, 16mm, 1949), Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore by Mark Leckey (15:00, video, 1999), Whispering Pines 8 by Shana Moulton (7:34, video, 2006)

TRT 75:00
curated by Mary Helena Clark

VENUS PROGRAMME DETAILS
Cinepolis by Alex Hubbard (1:55, video, 2007)
Brooklyn-based artist Alex Hubbard’s videos are face paced performances shot in a single take from above. In Cinepolis a flurry of activity occurs under the camera of objects assembled, manipulated and ultimately destroyed.

All Through the Night by Michael Robinson (4:20, video, 2008)
A charred visitation with an icy language of control: “there is no room for love”. Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

Elasticity by Chick Strand (22:00, 16mm, 1975)
“Impressionistic surrealism in three acts. The approach is literary experimental with optical effects. There are three mental states that are interesting: amnesia, euphoria and ecstasy. Amnesia is not knowing who you are and wanting desperately to know. I call this the White Night. Euphoria is not knowing who you are and not caring. This is the Dream of Meditation. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who you are and still not caring. I call this the Memory of the Future.” — CS

My Tears Are Dry by Laida Lertxundi (4:00, 16mm, 2009)
“A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted as guitar makes sound, two women, a bed, an armchair, and the beautiful outside. After Bruce Baillie’s All My Life. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises.” — LL

Footnotes to the House of Love by Laida Lertxundi (13:00, 16mm, 2007)
A series of shots in a California desert landscape in which there is a play between on frame and off frame, sound and image. There is an effort to create the space of a story, without a story, by the use of real time/diegetic sound. Love is felt as a force that determines the arrangement of the figures in the landscape. Music: Leslie Gore, Ari Up, The Kinks, The Shangri-Las, Henry Flynt, Laura Steenberge and The Crystals.

Puce Moment by Kenneth Anger (6:30, 16mm, 1949)
“A lavishly colored evocation of the Hollywood now gone, as shown through an afternoon in the milieu of a 1920s film star.” — KA

“Puce Moment is a fragment from an abandoned film project entitled Puce Woman. The soundtrack used here is the second one; the first was the overture to Verdi’s I Villi. The film reflects Anger’s concerns with the myths and decline of Hollywood, as well as with the ritual of dressing, with the movement from the interior to the exterior, and with color and sound synchronization …”
— Marilyn Singer, The American Federation of Arts

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore by Alex Hubbard

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore by Mark Leckey (15:00, video, 1999)
“Described by one commentator as the best thing they’d ever seen in a gallery, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is an extended paean to the unadulterated bliss of nocturnal abandon. A documentary of sorts, Leckey’s video chronicles the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth.”
— Matthew Higgs, ArtForum

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore uses found and original footage of discos and raves across Britain during the 70s, 80s and 90s. Details of clothing, technology, music and other cultural references surface briefly like uncanny folklore as the film explores a culture of collective leisure and consumption.

Whispering Pines 8 by Shana Moulton (7:34, video, 2006)
Moulton again performs as her alter-ego Cynthia in the latest episode of the Whispering Pine series. Fueled by the sugar-free drink Crystal Light, Cynthia methodically fills a vase with alchemical home decorating items. Once her project is completed, Cynthia is again left to dwell in her thoughts. Suddenly a ladder grows out of the vase. Cynthia climbs the ladder and, through a trap door, enters an ecstatic rave complete with a techno remix of the Crystal Light commercial music.
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Seven Question Interview with Matt McCormick, Portland-based Filmmaker and Artist

20 April, 2011 by

Matt McCormick filmmaker and artist Matt McCormick filmmaker and artist Matt McCormick filmmaker and artist

Matt McCormick is an ardent filmmaker and artist who resides in Portland, Oregon. He is an eminent maker in the avant-garde and independent sphere of cinema — voted one of the best filmmakers of the 21st century, according to a poll conducted by the Film Society of the Lincoln Center — Matt found early success with his well-known short The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (2002, narrated by Miranda July), which was named in  ‘Top 10 / Best of 2002’ lists in both The Village Voice and Art Forum magazine.

Matt collaborates with notable artists; Matt makes music videos for recognized bands: Broken Bells, The Shins, Miranda July, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, YACHT, Al Burian, Eluvium, Patton Oswalt, and Calvin Johnson, to name a few.

Matt McCormick has an aptitude for successfully distributing his films, whether it be D.I.Y. and starting his own distribution label (Peripheral Produce) and founding the PDX Film Festival, or simply just making great work and having it exhibit in a theatre, gallery, or festival.

“Matt has had three films screen at the Sundance Film Festival, and has had work screened or exhibited at MoMA, The Serpentine Gallery, The Oslo Museum of Modern Art, the Reykjavik Art Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and in 2007 he was selected to participate in both the Moscow Biennial and Art Basil.  He has received awards including Best Short Film from the San Francisco International Film Fest, Best Experimental from the New York Underground Film Fest, and Best Narrative from the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Matt’s debut feature film Some Days are Better Than Others premiered at SXSW and was invited to screen in the New Directors / New Films series presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.  Starring Carrie Brownstein and James Mercer, the film was acquired by Palisades Tartan and will be released theatrically in the spring of 2011.”

 

(1) During your early days of filmmaking, what were the challenges, and how did you surmount? What are the onerous aspects of the filmmaker’s journey?

I get the sense that the challenges never really cease. Even when I talk to my super successful filmmaker friends, I am always surprised to hear how difficult things can be. For me, the early challenges were as simple as getting access to equipment and finding venues that would screen my work. From there, the challenges largely became more internal — wanting to grow as an artist and make work that felt like a progression, or simply arranging your life so that the demands of filmmaking are not impeded on by other lifestyle choices. But I think the challenges are almost always there, from being frustrated because you want to make something, but lack the resources, to having made something, but being disappointed with how it turned out or was received. And then there is the whole “how am I going to make a living?” to boot. I think as a filmmaker, you just have to deal with it, and understand that there are challenges around every corner.

(more…)

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SPEED SHOW CHICAGO, 27 April, 2011

20 April, 2011 by

SPEED SHOW CHICAGO: “while loop is true”

27 April 2011
6 PM – 8 PM
FREE
With projects by: MAX CAPACITY, Christina Kassi, Whitney Houston, onehalfprince, Whitney Carrier, Sage Keeler, creepysleepovers (Valerie Brewer) with Alex Inglizian, Pall Thayer, Saya Da Jung, and Derek Repsch.
@

COPYMAX
1321 N Milwaukee Ave
Chicago IL
60622

Berlin-based artist/curator ARAM Bartholl initiated an ongoing series of exhibitions of New Media, Digital + web-based art called SPEED SHOWS. Starting in the summer of 2010, SPEED SHOWS have been held in Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, NYC + now Chicago. Chicago’s SPEED SHOW is curated by jonCates.

More: http://fffff.at/speed-show/

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April 17, 2011: SPACE PROGRAM presents: Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun

15 April, 2011 by


SPACE PROGRAM presents
“Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun”
Curated by Ben Russell

This Sunday!
April 17, 2011 | 7:30pm
at Thalia Hall
1807 S Allport, Chicago, IL, 60608 (map)
$5 suggested donation

Messenger Mercury is retrograde until April 23, but with this SPACE PROGRAM screening series, Mercury turns direct on Sunday, April 17th, 2011. Guided by the afflatus of the planetary teachers, Space Program projects indelible cinema in the historic, Pilsen-based Thalia Hall — both NASA employees and non-NASA employees are invited — but please note that this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, beaver pelts, caribou furs, and other warm goods. Considering the typical 40°–80° Chicago-flux of weather this time of year, it is advised that you bring extra beaver pelts and warm materials.

Synopsis of the Mercury Programme: “In honor of its eccentric orbit, its 176-day day, its large iron core, its tidal bulges and Beethoven Crater and its ‘gently rolling, hilly plains,’ your navigators at SPACE PROGRAM hereby propose an audiovisual third fly-by of the smallest galactic sphere: MERCURY.  The innermost planet of our Solar System, Mercury is metaphorically volatile, changeable, fickle and flighty.  It is a slow rotation with a sharp edge; one that occupies the two poles of our human psyche – Mercury is radical darkness, sorrow and despair; Mercury is blinding radiance, heat and wonderment.  Mercury is youth.  It is the cusp of adulthood, the terrors of development, that bittersweet joy of (not) knowing enough.  Viewed from our telescope, Mercury is Eva Marie Rødbro’s constellation of Texan teenagers, all infrared desire and insect and nipple pierce and imminent danger — the anxiety of that next rotation is deep, soul-shaking.  When we focus again, we see Mercury in the overwhelming sweetness and sorrow of Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks’ Streetwise (1984) — a document of a 1980s gang of Seattle street kids living in abandoned spaces (echoes of Thalia Hall), with the sort of heart-baring openness that can only come from living far too close to the sun … Where there is light, there is darkness.”

Below is a letter from the curator, Ben Russell:

Fellow Travelers,

On behalf of your friends at Mission Control (Pilsen), I am proud to announce the launch of SPACE PROGRAM* – a screening series in four parts that will temporarily re-colonize a world heretofore lost to Silence-and-Darkness in the name of Light-and-Sound.  Presented in the shadowy maw of Pilsen’s historic Thalia Hall under the guidance of artist/astronaut Ben Russell, SPACE PROGRAM is a satellite alternative to dominant media practices, a time-image map for those new constellations rapidly forming in your heads.  From April 17th onwards, each of the initial four SPACE PROGRAM screenings are named after and thematically curated in relation to one of the planets of our solar system.  Come, discover new worlds with us!  More specifically:

April 17th, 2011: MERCURY (see details below)
April 24th, 2011: VENUS (details TBA)
May 1st, 2011: MARS (details TBA)
May 8th, 2011: JUPITER (details TBA)

Space Is the Place,

Ben Russell

MERCURY PROGRAMME DETAILS

Featuring:
I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
Streetwise by Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
TRT 106:00

I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
These Texan youth are the descendants of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’, and they are both invincible and as fragile as a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching car. The Danish artist Eva Marie Rødbro’s sound-and-image montage is an extraordinary experience – a deeply poetic anthropological study of the self-destructive rites of passage of teenage life. This is the fragility of youth, caught shattering.  Everything is simultaneously animal and human, domestic and ethereal – that kid backflipping off his couch is an astronaut, untethered in space; those forgotten Jesus hymns are portals to St.Elsewhere, true.  If this video is a document then it’s also a vision – not just about what one looks at, but how one sees and hears the world.

Streetwise by Martin Bell (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
“The first time I saw this film, when I was a child, I felt like running away and living under a bridge, someplace or other. It’s an extremely beautiful film, which captures a time and a place that no longer exists in this way.” — Harmony Korine

Martin Bell’s unforgettable vérité documentary was shot on the streets of Seattle in the mid-1980s, and follows a group of homeless teenage kids aged between 13 and 19, who live off ‘container-raiding’, stealing and hustling. Rat, the dumpster diver, Tiny, the teenage prostitute, Shellie, the baby-faced blonde, DeWayne, the hustler, all old beyond their years.  They talk as if they were port workers, but behind the tough façade lie the vulnerable, small beings that have chosen the freedom of the street instead of the broken homes they come from. A raw masterpiece, and a kind of documentary precursor to Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), which Harmony Korine himself wrote the screenplay for as a teenager.  This is a film that is rarely screened, one that you’ll never forget.

===========================================================================

STREETWISE courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

SPACE PROGRAM is made possible by a grant from Propeller Fund and through material support from the The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.).

Launched in May 2010, Propeller Fund is administered jointly by Gallery 400, UIC and threewalls. Initial support for the program is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts as part of its initiative to promote informal and independently organized visual arts activities across the United States.

The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promote the arts by providing exhibition opportunities and educational resources for emerging artists in the Chicago-land community. E.A.T.’s goal is to enrich the neighborhood of Pilsen through inspired artistic productions showcased in Thalia Hall’s 800-seat theater and gallery space. E.A.T’s dynamic programs will cultivate a supportive artistic network where emerging artists can be empowered to share their voice.

More:
www.dimeshow.com

Thalia Hall

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The Complete Films of Fred Camper: Program Two

14 April, 2011 by

White Light Cinema Presents
The Complete Films of Fred Camper: Program Two
Fred Camper’s SN
Saturday, April 16, 2011 – 8:00pm
The Nightingale | 1084 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL (M A P)

“White Light Cinema is extremely pleased to present these very rare public screenings of the complete films of Fred Camper. Camper has been a thoughtful and articulate writer on film for over forty years (much of his writing is available on his website) and, more recently, has been producing an astonishing body of digital artworks. His earlier filmmaking practice, however, is little known. Long out of distribution (some never in distribution), his short 16mm and Super-8mm films have not been publicly screened for decades. And this presentation of his stunning feature-length Super-8mm film SN is only its third-ever public showing. These films may not be screened again for many years, due to their irreplaceability.”
PROGRAM DETAILS:

Program Two:
Fred Camper’s SN
Saturday, April 16, 2011 – 8:00pm
SN (1984, c. 110 minutes, super-8, silent)

“SN was born out of an intense personal despair, and a desire to depict a failure of the self, coincident with my discovery of super-8 as a medium completely different from 16mm, well suited to a kind of analog for the written diary. Its images’ natural lack of illusionistic presence and authority contributes to the failure theme. The original plan for the film would have required perhaps twenty years of full time work and a great deal of money, leading to a very long film only a small part of which would have been screened each time, selections made with a controlled use of random numbers. What I show now is in ten sections, and in the eighth, on three short reels, a tiny piece of the original plan survives: sixteen shorts serve as the source for this section, and which three are screened and the order in which they are screened at each showing is determined randomly. I have no final prints of any of SN; most sections are edited workprint or edited original, and are thus not exactly as they were intended to look. Still, I believe in it as a film. In part a portrait of Manhattan’s constricted spaces, and more generally of the way humans occupy space, it also presents the failed journey of a self to organize, or become present in, the world. The film has only been screened publicly twice before, and will likely only be screened rarely in its original format in the future.” (Fred Camper)

Fred Camper has been writing and publishing on cinema since the late 1960s, and on art since the late 1980s. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, and presented film programs throughout the world. For the last six years, he has mainly concentrated on making his own art, mostly photo based digital prints; cinema is one key inspiration. His Web site is www.fredcamper.com.

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Admission: $7.00-10.00 sliding scale

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More: Fredcamper.com

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Higher Education

8 April, 2011 by

Higher learning in economics class @ Western Michigan University. A true Bronco buster.

Submitted by SAR.

(If you have an orange dincastick, please stick in an inappropriate place, snap photo, and submit. Need a sticker? Click here.)

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Thoughts on Sucker Punch

25 March, 2011 by

I hate titles with double meanings

by Jack Kentala

It’s easy to trash a film.

Sucker Punch (2011) has the misfortune of being director Zach Snyder’s first film not rooted in a different medium. Just look at his filmography: he remade Dawn of the Dead; copped the graphic-novel style for 300 and Watchmen; and even “that owl movie” came from somewhere.

Here are where the problems immediately surface. Without source material providing a narrative roadmap, Snyder and his team simply spin their wheels until they get traction and then run with whatever ridiculousness they can concoct. In Sucker Punch, the title is far too apt: it can refer, quite directly, to the fact that the fractured narrative of the movie – which is actually explained in greater detail in the many trailers than in the final cut – simply jumps from one over-CGI’d setpiece to another.

At best, it’s visually interesting (albeit many of the scenarios have been played to death in too many videogames to count), and at worst, it’s loud, tiring, and reeks of a narrative and emotional bankruptcy. Explosions are louder than dialog; girls in school-uniform fetish outfits sub in for meaningful characters; and instead of tying it together through a means far more coherent than is presented in the movie, it simply seems like a glorified clearinghouse of visual concepts.

But what I can’t stress enough is the total lack of exposition, which is a bold statement coming from me, who likes to dig into a piece and extract precious nuggets of thematic meaning without getting the hammered-over-the-head Bruckheimer treatment. Not more than five minutes into the movie does anonymous main character Baby Doll find out that the supposed mental institution in which she is imprisoned is actually some sort of brothel, though flipping between those two fudged realities and the all-out fantasy of the trailers is done even worse than Inception.

(An aside: I had a bit of a Nolan-fest the past week to give the man another chance, and a repeat of Inception yielded no added enjoyment. Intact is my continued disgust for the kind of “mindfuck” movies that never come full circle and just leave the audience hanging on a head-scratching sigh. Or, in Inception’s case, the massive rage many experienced at the abrupt end of the film’s final shot.)

Sucker Punch is, unfortunately, one of those movies with no clear story, no characters, no justifications for CGI abuse (a growing post-millennium, post-The Matrix problem), and, to be a little too cruel, no point at all. I say “unfortunate” because the marketing blitzkrieg certainly charged at cinema’s juicy 14-year-old-boy demographic (I’m not making this up; go look at some numbers) with the promise of fishnet stockings, miniskirts, push-up bras, and a lot of skin. If I were a betting man, I’d say that the crowd that made the also-PG-13 Battle: Los Angeles an early-spring blockbuster will migrate to Sucker Punch and net, let’s say, $40 million its opening weekend. (I’m including grossly-inflated IMAX ticket prices for Sucker Punch: The IMAX Experience, even though Sucker Punch was not shot in the format.)

It’s a bit unfair on the part of the filmmakers in that the girls aren’t there to further the sort of female empowerment first championed by Ridley Scott’s Alien, but to tighten the pants of every male in the theaters who isn’t thinking that girls in PG-13 movies are starting to look a little too young these days. I didn’t spot any dirty old men in trenchcoats at my theater, but they can wait two months for the DVD without missing much.

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BEADS

22 March, 2011 by

BEADS from Andrew Rosinski on Vimeo.

Andrew Rosinski, 2010, 7 min, 35mm / 1080p, color, sound
Sound by Patrick Carroll

Look to Nature
Find Divine Beads
String and set in motion
The Earth plants Seeds.

http://andrewrosinski.com/beads.html

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Thoughts on Battle: Los Angeles

13 March, 2011 by

You know what you’re getting into

by Jack Kentala

As I’ve matured as a filmmaker, I’ve come to appreciate genre films. My ultimate guilty pleasure is American Pie, which isn’t shot particularly well, has editing that’s deliberately invisible, bears no particular directorial stamp, and yet it hits every bullet point on the list that determines what defines a perfect teenage sex comedy. Or consider the fact that I have seen every Saw film, every Rocky, both Hostels, the Cube trilogy, and will eventually start a campaign to watch all Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies.

So, then, my sound designer and I saw Battle: Los Angeles yesterday. We were recording ADR a week prior, and we both somewhat sheepishly expressed a curiosity in seeing a film that, by all accounts (and remains true after having seen it) is exactly what you expect from the trailer.

Before I go any further, I suppose I need to clear the air and make a definitive statement: I enjoyed Battle: Los Angeles. I enjoyed it for exactly what it was. Maybe it was low expectations or a palette-cleanser after so many awful year-end prestige films that fell flat when it came time to dish out Oscars. But no number of fifty-cent words can express that, stay with me here, I really enjoyed the movie.

If I just lost all credibility, go ahead and X out of this and watch some Criterion Collection. I watched Ken Loach’s intriguing, low-tech Kes the night prior, so let me off the hook once you cool off.

Battle: Los Angeles doesn’t start off so much with a script oversight but pointless “soft” character moments that don’t actually establish anything. All we know is that Aaron Eckhart’s Staff Sergeant Nantz isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, and wants out of the Marine Corps after twenty years of service, all under the shadow of a recent tour in Iraq in which many believe he was responsible for the deaths of several servicemen in his unit. Catastrophic “meteor” impacts delay Nantz retirement and pair him with a unit short a sergeant and commanded by a – you guessed it – cherry 2nd Lieutenant. In this unit, many soldiers don’t even bother to hide their contempt for Nantz, especially the brother of one of the killed men, who gets up in Nantz’s grill for coming home from Iraq with a silver star while everyone else came home in metal boxes.

And then we’re off. (more…)

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