Because of COVID-19, the San Francisco Peephole Cinema was on “pause” for a long time. We are looking to pair with an organization for a new public spot with lots of foot traffic-please reach-out if interested. Thank you all for your support.
To see past shows–use the “archive” link of this website.
Because of COVID-19, the Los Angeles Peephole Cinema was on “pause” for a long time. We are looking to pair with a sponsoring organization with lots of foot traffic-reach out if interested. Thank you all for your support.
To see past shows–use the “archive” link of this website.
The Peephole Cinema Los Angeles is a free, public cinema showing media-based works, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, through a dime-sized peephole in the Chinatown District of Los Angeles.
Automata is an artist-run performance gallery located in Los Angeles, California, dedicated to the creation, incubation and presentation of experimental puppet theater, experimental cinema and other contemporary art practices centered on ideas of artifice and performing objects. automata-la.org
Because of COVID-19, the Brooklyn Peephole Cinema will be on “pause” for the year. We will be back again in the same spot when it is safe. Thank you all for your support.
To see past shows–use the “archive” link of this website.
The cycles of life through habits, rituals and routines.
Curated by Sarah Klein
On view from January 27–June 15th, 2020
The Peephole Cinema is pleased to announce the opening of Ritualized Days. When it seems the world is spinning out of control politically, socially and environmentally, one might look to keeping a regular constitutional to square meaning and perspective. These routines, whether from personal habits or the outside world, can be a path towards transcendence. These four works witness and reflect on our rituals in the form of breath, exercise, our relationship to the sun and shadow dances.
Breath by Eva Bakkeslett, 2015
Breath is the poetic journey of the air that surrounds and flows through us constantly. We breathe the force of life through our bodies, air that has touched other creatures, traveled over continents, imbibed birds and animals, leaves and bark, earth and ocean. Every creature transforms the air and adds some of its own entity in the mixture before it goes on. Inhalation and exhalation is thus the essence of life.
Bakkeslett is a Norwegian artist, filmmaker, curator and cultural activist exploring the potential for social change through gentle actions and subtle mind shifts. Her practice combines film, participatory events and workshops. She creates spaces and experiences that challenge our thinking and unravel new narratives to bring attention to the patterns that connect us to the earth as a living organism. Bakkeslett’s work has been shown worldwide and her films have been screened in numerous film festivals and art events.
Blue of Noon by Alyssa Block, 2020
In the hand-drawn animation Blue of Noon, the shadows cast by a collection of items on a table suggest time passing and hint at the life and daily activities of an unseen person. Several vignettes are depicted, based on the artist’s actual dining/work table, and correspond to different times of day. At noon, objects lose their shadows, making them appear unmoored and, without a person present to manipulate them, startlingly themselves–just things. Midday has an ancient connection with something called “acedia,” a psychological problem among ascetics who maintained a solitary life, but could be applied to modern lives of office workers, artists, or married people. It’s described as a lull in energy, a sad restlessness, a directionless feeling associated with working hard without any reward, being overwhelmed by the future and bored by the present. In this short animation, we’re able to break through this uneasy noontime period and resume the banal daily tasks of working, eating, and living.
Alyssa Block is an artist living in San Francisco, California. She utilizes the solitary activity of drawing as a through-line between sculptures, animations, and designed objects which examine temporality, identity, and personal growth. She has exhibited her work throughout the Bay Area, including at Bass & Reiner and Gallery 16, and her functional objects have been sold through independent publishers and retailers such as Chronicle Books, Park Life, and The Thing Quarterly.
Orbit by Tess Martin, 2019
Orbit is a phonotrope project about the relationship between humanity and the sun. The sun’s energy circulates throughout the earth, feeding the cycle of life. Everything is connected in a natural loop, which repeats, like the circular discs of magical optical toys. This perfectly balanced rhythm is disrupted by human excess, throwing the cycle out of orbit and temporarily stopping the circulation of energy in nature.
Tess Martin is a filmmaker based in the Netherlands. Her work often blurs the boundaries between experimental/narrative and film/art. She has received numerous grants, prizes and artist residencies. Her work has been shown in festivals and galleries worldwide. Recent residencies include the Camargo Foundation in France Bogliasco Foundation in Italy and Open Workshop in Denmark. Recent funders include the Netherlands Film Fund, the City of Rotterdam, the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie and Rooftop Films.
New Millennium Workout Routine by Yaloo, 2015
New Millennium Workout Routine refers to the 1999 exercise development program the South Korean government issued for all students to perform in school. This exercise regime would ensure that South Korea as a nation would remain healthy for the next 1,000 years. Yaloo multiplies herself to create a sea of red and black bodies. The oscillating movements create complex waves, demonstrating the subtle force of these simple standardized gestures.
Yaloo is a South Korean born visual artist working with digital media. She explores the global circulation of images of culture in capitalism in forms of a theme park like immersive experience. She experiments with new possibilities of digital imaging output such as textiles, garments, VR, and projection mapping. She received MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago focusing on video installation in 2015. She was the first recipient of Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fellowship from Video Data Bank. She received Gold Award from AHL Foundation, NY. She is also a recent grant recipient from Incheon Foundation of Art and Culture, South Korea. She is a full fellowship recipient of Asia Cultural Center in South Korea, Headlands Art Center in the U.S., Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan and Western Front in Canada among others. Her works have been part of number of solo/group shows and festivals around the world.
About the Curator
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She began curating for the San Francisco branch of the Peephole Cinema in 2015. Klein is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage and the New Jersey Center for Visual Art in Summit, NJ. In 2008 she founded the internationally touring screening program Stop & Go that showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. Her work has screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, Tweetakt Festival in Utrecht, NL, Anthology Film Archives in New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, HR. In 2018 she was a Media Arts Residency Fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.
A collection of videos showcasing Iranian artists. The title Hofreh is a Persian word for hole or cavity and can also mean eye socket.
Curated by Minoosh Zomorodinia
December 3, 2019 – January 25, 2020
The Peephole Cinema in San Francisco is proud to present “Hofreh” a collection of videos showcasing Iranian artists who live and work in the cities of Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz and Khoramabad. The title of this show is a Persian word that translates to hole or cavity and also applies to the word for eye socket. It’s a fitting title for works that respond to the Peephole Cinema’s unique space: videos that loop inside a hole in a wall located street side on a building in the Mission District. In this show the artists express challenges of identity and gender and sometimes use their bodies as a natural set up to express the power of fertility and love. Curated by Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist Minoosh Zomorodinia this show brings together a collection of artists that are part of her extended community. In these works there are references to loss and societal expectations. Loss of the natural environment caused by urban development in Iran’s cities and the human struggle as it relates to societal expectations on women. The later, causes many to leave the country so they can live freely rather than satisfy their family’s demand or societies pressures.
Offering by Tara Goudarzi, 2008-2019
It was black at first
Just like a death of a tree
And I was dressed in white
Just like when I was born
By the vastness of the beach
The purity of my being experienced the blood of the earth
And then, I was green all over while released of all boundaries
In the “Offering”, I put on my veil since we have always been together, ever since I was 9, sometimes out of divine love and sometimes out of hatred. Now I only enjoy its purity, and its plainness, its whiteness. And I offer all of this to the endless greatness.
Tara Goudarzi (b.1978) is a visual art educator multi-disciplinary and environmental artistwho lives and works in Khoramabad, Iran. She received her B.A. in painting in 2009. Sheworks in performance, video and installation art. She has participated and collaboratedwith many artists in more than 26 Environmental Art Festivals since 2006. Goudarzi cofoundedthe ARTA Contemporary Art Institute in 2014. She is the organizer of Light ArtPerformance Events and the Homar Festival. Her works has been exhibited locally andinternationally in Singapore, India, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Korea,England, Canada, America, Romania, Mexico, Finland and Iran.
Hasht, (meaning number eight in Persian: ٨) by Majid Ziaee, 2017
In-between: Includes eight mysterious essences and hidden meanings in art and literature of Iran. Eights climate in Suhrawardi’s works are the agent between the two universes. In geometry and architecture, the standing of this number is between a square and circle, between sky and earth. A middle element, like a desert, pictures the border of existence and non-existence inside itself. The title Hasht is the number eight in Persian and stands for the eight motions in original work.
Majid Ziaee, born in Mashhad, Iran in 1982. He lives and works in Tabriz. He received a PhD in Art and Research, a BA in Crafts, and a MA in Islamic Art majoring Ceramic from Shahed University, Tehran, Iran. He is a faculty member of Tabriz Islamic Art University (TIAU). His medium is ceramic, emphasizing its use in the environment. He is interested in ephemeral works observing nature. His recent pieces includes working with natural elements found objects in nature and performance works. He has received several residencies at Global Nomadic Art Project of Yatoo Center in South Korea, France, and Lithuania.
Friendship by Atefeh Khas, 2019
Friendship is a different personal relationship that essentially involves a distinctive kind of concern for your friend, a concern that might reasonably be understood as a kind of love.
Atefeh Khas was born in Tehran in 1985. She received her MA in Art Research from Alzahra University, 2014, and BFA in Painting from Shahed University in Tehran, in 2010.
She has received several residencies and awards such as the Environmental Art Residency Program in South Korea in 2012, the Almaken 2nd International Contemporary Art Festival in Tunisia in 2016, Global Nomadic Art Project in Iran, Germany, France and Turkey in 2016 and 2017. Her works are published on the cover of the magazine “The Middle East in London”, University of London (SOAS) in 2015, the Yatoo-i Environmental Art Calendar 2015 and 2017. She has had her works exhibited in Canada, United States, Belgium, Romania, South Korea, France, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungry, Tunisia, Poland, Sri-Lanka, Turkey, Nepal and India.
A Stone Embryo by Nooshin Naficy, 2017
From “I Am Nature’s Child and Nature Is My Child” series and shown in the Third International Festival of Homar ARTA Contemporary Arts Institute, Khoramabad, Iran. Camera: Tara Godarzi and Sepehr Godarzi. Editor: Shahin Shabazi
Nooshin Naficy is an artist and educator. She was born in Isfahan, Iran to a large and cultured family in 1959. She went to Tehran to pursue theoretical and practical principles of painting in 1986. She is a founder of Baran Institute, where she has taught art to children and adults for twenty years. She is a member and instructor at the Painters’ Association of Isfahan. Since 2003, she has worked with the Rangin Kaman Institute for the Elderly as the painting instructor and Head of the Art Department. Naficy is a member of Godar collective in Isfahan since 2004. Her videos have been screened in Iran, South Korea, Romania, Hungary, England, Germany, USA, and Finland.
Bubbles by Setareh Hosseini, 2015
Girls suspended between staying and leaving, amongst the narratives planned by today’s lives.
Girls left back, or girls that count their dreams in the hidden celebration.
Girls who’ve come from crowds and silences.
Girls who’s secrets are bubbles, whose dreams are bubbles, and whose future are bubbles for them.
Girls of waiting.
– Based on a poem by Ahmad Shamlou
Setareh Hosseini was born in Tehran in 1979. She was touched by her mother’s art classes as music and painting was the atmosphere in their house. She pursued a B.A. in Graphic Design and M.A. in Illustration to continue her passion. She finds her way through different art forms using her skills to express herself, from illustration to photography and video art. Her works address women and their relation to Iranian society. A relation which is a conflict of traditional and contemporary cultural aspects. Diversity, integration, local, international and human relation with community or sexuality are main aspects in her art work. Hosseini has participated in many art festivals and biennials with her work been exhibited in Italy, France, Korea, and Iran.
Mirror Sky by Raziyeh Goudarzi, 2015
Every day we see many things around ourselves but never watch or notice them. I don’t know what the reason of not watching is…perhaps it has become usual for us.
Razieh Goudarzi was born in Khoramabad in 1987. She recieved her MBA degree in Executive Management in Tehran. She became interested in contemporary art when she was a teenager and participating in many group shows since. She is one of the co-founder and director of ARTA Contemporary Art Institute in Khoramabad where she organizes environmental art festivals, studio art classes, and education programs. She employs photography, video and performance art in her practice. Her work has been exhibited at the International Art Biennial in India and International Lake Velence Symposium in Hungary and her work has been shown in the United States, Romania, France, Germany, Hungary and Iran.
About the Curator
Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist, who sometimes curates exhibitions and organizes programs in non-commercial venues. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2009. Her artwork exposes and experiments with humanity’s relationship to the natural world. She employs walking as a catalyst to reference nomadic lifestyle, as well as colonialism. She earned her MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, and holds a Masters degree in Graphic Design and a BA in Photography from Azad University in Tehran, Iran. She is a member of Curatorial Council Committee at Southern Exposure gallery in San Francisco. She has received awards and residences from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Kala Art Institute, Ox-Bow School of Art andDjerassi Artist Residency Program. She is the recipient of an Alternative Exposure Award and a California Art Council grant. She has exhibited locally and internationally at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, SOMARTS, Pori Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, and ProARTS. Her work has received press coverage in SF Chronicle, Hyperallergic, SF Weekly, KQED, CityArts Magazine, and Tacoma Weekly News.
Three pieces by female* artists Jane Cheadle, Ruth Lingford and Laleh Khorramian. Curated by Meghana Bisineer
October 7, 2019 – November 30, 2019
We look through the peephole into private sensual spaces and the politics around inner landscapes of the female* body and its pleasure. Rendering inner worlds – reclaiming women’s corporeal, spiritual and sexual space and challenging the predominant cinematic gaze.This program reflects on voyeurism as access and mutuality, hence throwing the gaze back at the looker, their erotic ways of looking and the spectacle – questioning the boundaries of the private and public space.
Spotless by Jane Cheadle, 2019
‘Spotless’ is part of a much longer animation that forms a kind of misfit mobius strip that loops back on itself. I was inspired by Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 film ‘Onibaba’. In the film, set in 14th century Japan, two women murderously glean from passing soldiers at a time of war and then one of them falls into a very large hole. I wanted to remake this film using only circles (holes) but this turned out to be an utterly impossible task..
Jane is an artist and animator whose projects sometimes take the form of reading groups, workshops and ad hoc events. Recent screenings of work include Tate Exchange, London; Semaphore Gallery, Switzerland; Sehsaal Gallery, Austria; Drawing Centre, New York (online) and Musee d’art Contemporain du Val de Marne. Her work has been commissioned by London Guildhall, The Prince’s Trust, Animate! Channel 4, Arts Council Suffolk and the Gdansk Institute of Art. She has collaborated on videos for charities Safe Passage, Black Sash and the Treatment Action Campaign. She is the author of the Moving Image:Animation course at the Open College of the Arts, and has taught at Oxford Brookes, Central St. Martins and the Royal Drawing School. She has run workshops at Cambridge University, The University of East London, Bournemouth University and the Royal College of Art.
www.cargocollective.com/janecheadle
What she Wants by Ruth Lingford, 1994
Funded by the Arts Council of England’s Animate Scheme, What She Wants (1994) was Lingford’s first film after leaving the Royal College of Art. Lack of access to traditional equipment drove her to experiment with her home Amiga computer, and this film was made on around 20 floppy discs! A meditation on sexual fantasy and capitalism in detumescence, the film was inspired by Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. The soundtrack is by the late Lol Coxhill.
Born in London, Lingford worked as an Occupational Therapist before studying Animation at the Royal College of Art. She has made several short films, and worked on music videos and documentaries. She has taught at the Royal College of Art and the National Film and Television School in the UK. Since 2005, she has taught animation at Harvard University.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Lingford
I Without End by Laleh Khorramian, 2008
Two lovers are shot in time-lapse, capturing an unexpectedly sensual drama. Caught somewhere between living and dying, the figures decay rhythmically, until all moisture is gone and their movements subside. The absurdity of fruit peel as a human metaphor brings two realities together: the physicality of the material world meets the equal force of the inner world of desire, emotion, love, intimacy, and death and decay. I Without End, the third chapter in a cycle of five animations, is part of an ongoing experiment in combining the mediums of drawing, magnification of time and space, process and cinema. Each episode is structured around a primal element–earth, air, water, fire, and space. ‘I Without End’ takes fire as its inspiration, both as a energetic force and an emotional and psychological metaphor.
Laleh Khorramian’s work takes theater and the spectacle as its point of departure, to explore aspects of human nature and emotional states of consciousness, and the possibilities of drawing as a medium. Her work combines animation and drawing in order to capture and emphasizes particular stages of the art-making process. These animations look to cinema in its juxtaposition of moving image and sounds. They look to drawing and printmaking for the possibilities of chance accidents, the manipulation of found material, and the mark of the human trace. Her experimental animations use her own monoprints and drawings as tools for storytelling. Stop-motion animation can alter the representation of time, giving mundane scenarios a mythical, out-of-time quality allowing her to stage narratives that are subjective accounts of historic event, ancient myths, and biblical themes. By removing cultural and historic specificity from these narratives, she examines the essence of their visual forms and emotional content. Laleh has exhibited internationally, including solo shows in New York, Vienna, and Dubai.
About the Curator
Meghana Bisineer is a Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She completed her Master’s Degree at the Royal College of Art in London, UK where she lived and worked for 13 years before relocating to California. She is currently Asst. Professor of Animation, Undergraduate and Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts. She is the co-founder and co-curator of Eyewash Experimental Animation Salon with Christoph Stegar. Bisineer’s films have been screened at several international film festivals and exhibitions in Europe, UK, USA and Asia. She has completed Artist residencies in India, UK and France where her work was recently part of a program of shows at Draw International in collaboration with Les Abattoirs Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Toulouse. She has recently been awarded a Fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy for her upcoming work in Spring 2020.
Curated by Janie Geiser, Susan Simpson, Gina Napolitan & Laurie O’Brien. This program is playing simultaneously at the Peephole Cinema in Los Angeles.
from July 23, 2019 – October 5, 2019
Phosphene Phantasmagoria, 2017. The storybook is closed, the lamp extinguished, the images of the day recede, yet before sleep takes hold bright lights dance and flicker behind the eyelid, as if projected onto a miniature screen. If you look closely interwoven in the small explosions of color are the fragmentary remains of nursery rhymes. Menacing, absurd, surreal. It is time for the phantoms… a moment when images stored in the unconscious return in bursts of biophotonic light to construct their own stories: playful yet disturbing revenants. This work has been created from victorian lantern slides made for children that were photographed onto 16mm which was subsequently buried, exhumed and scanned on a flat bed scanner.
Charlotte Pryce has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Born in London, Charlotte Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London and completed an MFA in Fine Art/ Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films have screened in numerous festivals including Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Ann Arbor and London. In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglas Edwards Award for Best Experimental Cinema Achievement, and in 2014 she was the recipient of Film at Wits End Award, and in 2015 she received the Gil Omenn Art and Science Award from the Ann Arbor film Festival. In January 2019 she presented a career retrospective at the Rotterdam Film Festival and her work was performed at the Bozar in Brussels and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
http://www.charlottepryce.net/
Edge of Alchemy, 2017. Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor, seamlessly appropriated from their early silent films, are cast into a surreal epic with an upending of the Frankenstein story and a contemporary undercurrent of hive collapse. In this handmade film, Stacey Steers selects sequences from early cinematic sources, prints the frames and re-contextualizes the action, allowing the ‘story’ assembled from appropriated images to evolve over time. She inserts her actors into newly imagined collage environments, built by hand from fragments of 19thcentury engravings and illustrations. Edge of Alchemy is the third film in a trilogy examining women’s inner worlds. Music by the Polish composer Lech Jankowski (Brothers Quay).
Cast: Mary Pickford: the scientist
Janet Gaynor: the creature
Animation, concept, design: Stacey Steers
Music and sound: Lech Jankowski
Editor: Antony Cooper
Additional effects and sound mix: Phil Solomon
Assistant animator: John Romano
Production assistant: Deborah Jordy
35mm camera: Victor Jendras
Color Correction and 4K transfer: Patrick Lindenmaier
Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Steers’ animated films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, New Directors New Films, IFFR Rotterdam, Locarno IFF, MoMA, Lincoln Center and the National Gallery of Art. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.
Three choreographed pieces by Chicago-based animators
Alex Moy, Paloma Trecka and Selina Trepp
March 21, 2019 – July 21, 2019
Curated by Lisa Barcy
For this show I chose three abstract pieces by Chicago-based animators. Each has it’s own form of choreography built by spontaneous drawing, cutting and composition. They exude a sense of joy and playfulness as forms interact, and serve as a sort of documentation of the individual artists thought process during the act of animating.
When You Enter, You Exit by Selina Trepp, 2019
Selina Trepp is an artist researching economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is a goal, living a life of adventure is a way, embarrassment is often the result. She works across media, combining performance, installation, painting, and sculpture to create intricate setups that result in photos, drawings and animations. In addition to the studio-based work, Selina is active in the experimental music scene. In this context she sings and plays the videolah, her midi controlled video synthesizer, to create projected animations in real-time as visual music. She performs with a varying cast of collaborators and as one half of Spectralina, her long running audiovisual collaboration with Dan Bitney.
Idle Torrent by Alex Moy, 2019
Alex Moy is an independent designer and animator currently living in New York. Alex’s piece titled Idle Torrent is an abstract animation that follows one subject through the discomfort of stillness. It is a study of personal growth amidst tumultuous times
Alex is originally from Chicago and received his BFA in Graphic Design and a BA in Animation at DePaul University in 2018. He works most in 2D digital animation using a frame by frame, hand drawn process – his body of work ranges in subject matter, but often tackling themes of introspection through the use of surreal landscapes and lucid narratives.
Tombolo by Paloma Trecka, 2019
Paloma Trecka is an artist and educator based in Chicago. She studied Studio Art and Design for the Theater in Montreal and has a BFA from Concordia University. For nearly three decades, Paloma has assisted in animation production for broadcast design and television commercials. She is currently teaching young people about film history, and the art and industry of animation at DePaul University and Columbia College Chicago, and is emerging as an abstract collage artist. In the short animated film Tombolo, Paloma is exploring rhythmic repetitions of color and patterns. The materials used are hand-cut pieces of paper packaging and old LP album covers. Everything used in her art and films are materials gleaned from piles of rubbish as it is her mandate to use what is available and in abundance whenever possible.
The Curator
Lisa Barcy is an animator and artist who works in a variety of media including short films, music videos, theatrical puppets, collages and artists books. Her films have been screened in numerous festivals internationally. More of her work can be seen on Vimeo or at lisabarcy.squarespace.com
A collection of films by artists from Creativity Explored
Curated by Sarah Klein
Each piece radiates with devotion as the artists reconstruct or pay homage to their favorite pop sensations. The works were produced by three artists from Creativity Explored (CE). CE is based in the Mission District and gives artists with developmental disabilities the means to create and share their work with the community.
from March 18, 2019 – May 18, 2019
The Peephole Cinema San Francisco is presented in partnership with Intersection for the Arts as part of the Intersect SF series supported with funds from Grants for the Arts.
Paul’s Drag Race by Paul Pulizzano, 2018
Paul Pulizzano spends his creative energy focused on rendering human subjects from pop culture, history, and elsewhere. In his piece Paul’s Drag Race the artist pays tribute to the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race by creating a new character Candy Delight. Pulizzano makes all his characters and environments in the animation by hand. His style has a simple boldness, with surfaces that are worked assuredly but sparingly, just enough to capture certain mysterious characteristics of his models.
There is a seriousness of purpose in Paul Pulizzano that comes through in his artwork. Whether working with acrylic–his preferred medium, charcoal, colored pencil, or papier-mâché there is always something striking about a Pulizzano portrait.
A Moment Like This by Makeya Kaiser, 2019
In A Moment Like This the artist Makeya Kaiser pays tribute to Kelly Clarkson and adds her own unique twist on Clarkson’s hit “A Moment Like This”. In the piece Kaiser answers what she would do in her moment and like many of her music videos she weaves the celebrity with the fan, the private with the public, and performance with intimate moments.
Makeya Kaiser’s multi-media approach in her films is paralleled in her 2D and 3D work. She moves fluidly through a variety of techniques like painting, drawing, papier-mache and collage. Kaiser is always willing to take risks in her art, this engagement with an experimental process gives all her work a defining and bold quality.
The Burning Birds by Mack Mesler, 2018
The Burning Birds by Mack Mesler pays homage to the film Mad Max and features a rivalry Max has with a gang of penguins. In Messler’s version, the clever penguins are always three steps ahead of Max, outsmarting and outwitting in several slapstick scenarios.
Mack Mesler works primarily as a digital illustrator and renders painterly landscapes and comic drawings that mobilize humor, bight color fields and digitized effects to create his recognizable body of work. His digital landscapes have a turn toward the contemporary and feature bright pixel deserts, neon cacti and electric sunsets. He is best known for his character group The Burning Birds, a roving band of penguins that go on adventures all over the world while defending themselves from an overblown penguin hunter.
The Curator
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She began curating for the San Francisco branch of the Peephole Cinema in 2015. Klein is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage and the New Jersey Center for Visual Art in Summit, NJ. In 2008 she founded the internationally touring screening program Stop & Go which showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. Her work has screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, Tweetakt Festival in Utrecht, NL, Anthology Film Archives in New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, HR. This year she was a Media Arts Residency Fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.
January 8, 2019 – March 15, 2019
Work by Stacey Goodman, Gwyneth Zeleny Anderso & Minoosh Zomorodinia
Curated by Sarah Klein
The Peephole Cinema San Francisco is presented in partnership with Intersection for the Arts as part of the Intersect SF series supported with funds from Grants for the Arts.
Sensation 2018 by Minoosh Zomorodinia, 2018
In Sensation 2018 the artist Minoosh Zomorodinia investigates the self by exploring the natural environment. Her body merges with the landscape through the use of an emergency blanket and the force of gusting wind. The artist specifically chose a thermal blanket to reference global warming. The synthetic and reflective surface of the blanket covers her body and results with the figure being in harmony with the
mountainscape and reflecting sky. One video in an ongoing series, Zomorodinia refers to these as an action of resistance. We are left to question if the artist is bracing for what may come or giving up to unseen forces.
Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist who makes visible her emotional and psychological reflections as seen in her mind’s eye inspired by nature and her environments. Her work exposes and experiments with humanity’s relationship to the natural world. She earned her MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, and holds a Masters degree in Graphic Design and BA in Photography from Azad University in Tehran. She has received several awards and residences including MFA Fellowship from San Francisco Art Institute, Kala Art Institute Media Arts Fellowship, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She has exhibited locally and internationally. Currently she works and lives in the Bay Area and is Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts.
Passage by Stacey Goodman, 2017
The work Passage is a meditation on the real fears of our time. The artist Stacey Goodman says…”Passage reflects my restless sleep habits, the inability to remember my dreams, and my personal challenge with night terrors in an age of anxiety. Since November 2016, these conditions have only gotten worse. I shot this video on Lummi Island in the northwest corner of Washington State, one of the most beautiful and peaceful places that I know. Despite the tranquility of this environment, my internal life while I was there was haunted and full of worry, for my son, for my country, for the planet. The six versions of myself that appear simultaneously go from waking to sleeping during the time it takes for the ship to cross the island passage in the far background of the video.”
Stacey Goodman is an artist living in Oakland, California. His practice is wide-ranging and employs various disciplines, including drawing, sculpture, and video works, to create environments that are often anchored by performance. Stacey’s work seeks to expand the conversations around politics and social justice to include our connections to the nonhuman, the stars, and an embrace of the unknown.
Virtual Reality for a Horizon by Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson, 2011
The work Virtual Reality for a Horizon was created with the intention to be played in front of any kind of horizon line. Much like pornography or any other virtual expression of intimacy, it conveys an impossibly distant, yet empathetic, touch. This is the final video of a series called Sykliä (Finnish for cycles) which are six short, looped videos and animations to be screened within different elements of a particular landscape.
Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson is a depressive animist, composed mostly of
water, descended from European invaders and immigrants. Her practice is rooted in the ubiquity of sensation, shaped by the handmade animation process, and fueled by awe for how, at any scale, individuality is made of plurality. She has presented projects in galleries, festivals, forests, and empty lots throughout the Northern Hemisphere, including with Roman Susan, Roots & Culture, the Hyde Park Art Center, 6018 NORTH, and the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago; MoMA PS1 Print Shop in New York; FRISE in Hamburg; and @ptt in Geneva.
The Curator
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She began curating for the San Francisco branch of the Peephole Cinema in 2015. Klein is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage and the New Jersey Center for Visual Art in Summit, NJ. In 2008 she founded the internationally touring screening program Stop & Go which showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. Her work has screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, Tweetakt Festival in Utrecht, NL, Anthology Film Archives in New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, HR. This year she was a Media Arts Residency Fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.
our natural surroundings and find wonder within them.
Work by Amy Hibbs, Wioleta Kaminska and Juila Oldham
Curated by Sarah Klein
from November 7, 2018 – January 5, 2019
Oculis Magnis by Wioleta Kaminska, 2018
Oculis Magnis (Big Eyes) features a family of owls that the artist Wioleta Kaminska saw unexpectedly on a late afternoon walk in Golden Gate Park. Kaminska describes these hours with the owls as “time stopping” and the magical moment is shared with us in her work. Perhaps we can also find stillness and relief from our fast paced lives in the gaze of these magnificent birds.
Wioleta Kaminska is a San Francisco based artist interested in the visual exploration of a momentary nature of time and space. Her meditative video landscapes are both a study in perception and stillness and a visual reflection on the intersection between nature, technology and culture. Walking is an integral part of her work and a way of capturing the spirit of a place; those moments that intrigue and encourage a viewer to find some time for contemplation and reflection, an opportunity to slow down and, consequently, witness the whole world stopping in front of our very own eyes. A moment we all need to live a healthy and balanced life.
Turgor Pressure by Amy Hibbs, 2018
Turgor Pressure is a one-minute compilation of pieces depicting the re-hydration of lichen. The short videos animate a totally quotidian and overlooked process made visible by the magic of time-lapse animation. Amy Hibbs is a San Jose-based artist whose work with plants spans both wet and dry media. A California native who has traveled widely and returned home, Hibbs’ work is made with the intent to bring new awareness and a sense of discovery to the natural and mostly hidden botanic processes. To this end, her work is both scientific and artistic experiment, a civic and a private inquiry.
Amy Hibbs is an artist, illustrator, and freelance exhibition manager, working and exhibiting largely in the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied at Mills College and was awarded a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2005-06.
Wolf in Motion by Julia Oldham, 2018
Using Eadweard Muybridge’s image sequences of running animals as reference, Julia Oldham created a careful study of a wolf in motion. In this short clip, the artist draws with more detail than is typical for hand-drawn animation in order to capture the textures and gravity of the wolf’s gate.
Julia Oldham is an artist and storyteller who was raised by a physicist, a rock hound and a pack of dogs in rural Maryland. Born the same year as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, Oldham has been consumed by scientific curiosity her entire life, and has sought through her work to understand the unknowable and transcend humanness. She blends digital media and drawing to tell stories that she finds both troubling and beautiful, ranging from the historical tale of Laika the Soviet Space Dog’s journey into orbit to science fiction visions of a post-apocalyptic future world populated by high-tech chihuahuas. She frequently collaborates with scientists and finds hidden love stories in particle physics and theoretical mathematics, and ghost stories in wetland ecology. Oldham builds her alternate realities by combining photography and video with fantastical hand-drawn characters and landscapes; and this process results in work that rides a fine line between the real and unreal.
SUPERSYMMETRY
Four media artists take on the mysteries of neurobiology and mental landscape through layered gestures and the use of handmade, found, re-appropriated and collected imagery.
Work by Meghana Bisineer, Farley Gwazda, Kathleen Quillian and Azin Seraj
Guest Curated by Lydia Greer
from September 5, 2018 – November 5, 2018
Meghana Bisineer, Dog, 2014, 1 min, Animation Installation ‘We weave our memories into a palimpsest of dreams where time and place melt into each other.’ Terence Davies Dog is a ritualistic accumulation of gestures and memory ; drawn on a single large surface recorded over several days. The work embodies the time taken to make it. This is a single-take video of the animation (direct to camera animation on surface sized 150 cm x 250 cm projected onto the book). Meghana Bisineer is an artist, animator and educator. She grew up in India, studied at the Royal College of Art in London and continued to live and work there for the next 13 years. Meghana moved to Oakland, California in 2016 and is currently Assistant Professor (Animation and Graduate Fine Arts) at California College of the Arts. Her works take the form of drawings, prints, animations and installations. They have been shown at several international animations festivals, screenings and exhibitions across Asia, UK, USA and Europe. https://vimeo.com/megbisineer
Farley Gwazda, Noösphere Motion Studies Farley Gwazda’s Noösphere Motion Studies are layered video collages created from animated gif files appropriated from the STEM fields. Originally produced as illustrations, these images were intended to have specific meanings to be interpreted narrowly. Through the specific compositional and narrative choices by which the artist re-presents these pictures, the potential for open-ended interpretation is restored. The term Noösphere, referring to the knowledge/information/thought that is overlaid on top of the geosphere and biosphere, was coined by paleontologist, futurologist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955), who speculated on the long-term future of consciousness in the cosmos. Farley Gwazda is an artist and curator who lives and works in Berkeley, CA.
Kathleen Quillian will be showing a one minute stop-motion animation that weaves together science, technology and historical popular culture using found imagery. Kathleen Quillian is an Oakland-based artist who works in a range of moving and non-moving media. She has exhibited in venues and festivals internationally including International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco International Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art Festival, Animasivo, REDCAT, the Exploratorium and the San Jose Museum of Art among others. She has served on the boards of directors of San Francisco Cinematheque and Artists’ Television Access and is currently co-director of the monthly expanded cinema series Shapeshifters Cinema. Her work is made in the pursuit of understanding our collective and individual attempts to manifest, manipulate or otherwise connect with the unknown. http://www.kathleenquillian.com/
Azin Seraj, Synchronous Inspired by The Butterfly Effect, Synchronous (excerpt, 2018) explores the causal relationships of human connection on the subconscious level. How is the mind scape transformed by the magnetic, non-deterministic forces that emerge when a bond is formed with an other? As an Iranian native, Canadian citizen, and American resident, Azin Seraj’s art practice is situated between languages and cultures, and informed by her experience as an immigrant woman. Seraj’s video, photography, and multimedia installations are grounded in a transnational visual culture that is unique to her personal history, and presented as visually and sonically lush environments.
The Curator
Lydia Greer is a visual artist whose layered, mixed media work includes sculptural and video installation, hand-made animation, single and multiple channel video, puppet theatre, extended cinema, and works with paper. She works with themes of allegory and euphemism in narrative structures exploring the languages of psychology and theatre. Lydia is interested in the most elaborate forms of storytelling as well as the narrative charge of everyday objects and how these communication ceremonies play out in the personal, spiritual and historical/political arena. Her work has been shown at the Exploratorium Museum, Kala Art Institute Gallery, Artists’ Television Access, Museum of Human Achievement, Pacific Film Archive/Berkeley Art Museum and the International PhotoFairs among other venues. She has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center and a Media Arts Fellow at Kala Art Institute. Lydia is currently the Artistic Director of Facing West Shadow Opera: a collective of artists and musicians hybridizing art forms to create unique performances, each akin to a live graphic novel with euphoria-inducing live chamber music.
SUPERNATURAL URBAN
Where the eerily familiar is strangely out of place
Work by Liz Hickok, Edward Ramsay-Morin and Ellen Wetmore
Curated by Sarah Klein
On view 24 hours a day
from July 9, 2018 – September 5, 2018
Mosaicity from the Ground Waters series is a phantasmagorical miniature cityscape with collapsing Jell-O buildings and crystal trees. It’s an otherworldly space in which viewers can immerse themselves and recall times when magic was real and anything was possible.
Liz Hickok is a San Francisco-based artist working in photography, video, sculpture, and installation. She has exhibited at arts institutions across the country and internationally from Washington to Israel. Recently, Liz developed a photomural for Google’s San Francisco offices and participated in Experiments in Form & Fiction at Capsule Gallery in Houston, TX. Hickok has completed several public art projects including photomurals for UCSF Mission Bay and a neighborhood revitalization project in Denver, CO. Hickok’s artwork is included in art collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Blue Shield of California, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Mills College Art Museum. Hickok is currently participating in Natural Systems at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, and is slated to have a solo exhibition at the Longview Museum of Fine Arts in Longview, TX.
Edward Ramsay-Morin’s creative practice is driven by a need to make connections and answer questions, rather than a need to realize a predetermined idea or concept. In Between Here and There explores the space between knowing and not knowing, and what it’s like to slip back and fourth between the two.
Edward Ramsay-Morin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. His work includes experimental animation, video, and sound. His films have been screened at festivals and galleries in over 70 events in 12 countries. He lives in Huntsville, Texas with his wife and daughter, both of whom are his favorite artists.
Ellen Wetmore’s artworks inspire a blend of humor and horror. Her work focuses on lived experience blended with well-honed paranoia, using her body as the primary vehicle. Working in the mediums of drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, and employing ideas that are often subversive and polemical in nature, Wetmore’s work collapses the distance between sign based languages and experience. Out for a Walk in Florence is a response to the 2017 exhibition of Bill Viola at Palazzo Strozzi. The piece was shot at the Palazzo. Interested in the “Grotesque” and spending time in Florence Wetmore pulled upon relationships between the Renaissance and the comedic commentaries on the walls of power.
Wetmore’s video projects have been featured in screenings at the Sandwell Arts Trust in the West Midlands, UK, Ciné Lumière in London, the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, NY, Currents, Santa Fe, New Mexico, CologneOff, Cologne, Germany, Videoholica in Bulgaria, and the MIA screen in Cairo. Her most recent work is on the 80-foot tall 7-screen marquee at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow, a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome and served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Georgia Fee award and in 2017 was awarded the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Film/Video and a Berkshire Taconic ART Grant. She lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
The Curator
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She began curating for the San Francisco branch of the Peephole Cinema in 2015. Klein is the co- organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage, online and the New Jersey Center for Visual Art in Summit, NJ. In 2008 she founded the internationally touring screening program Stop & Go which showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. Her work has screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, Tweetakt Festival in Utrect, NL, Anthology Film Archives in New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, HR. Recent commissions include an animation for the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. Currently Klein is a Media Arts Residency Fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.
Hands is a Double exposed 8mm black & white film by Emil Salto. In the piece the filmstrip shows two illuminated hands softly pressing towards each other, as if exploring an imperceptible source. The hands take record of each other and softly touch in their parallel performance of double exposure. Although the hands exist at different times, one hand searches the presence of the other in its absence, as if different moments could somehow assimilate. Time in itself seems brutally moving, irrational and mysterious – an elastic conception, a non-quantifiable measure out of sync from its own calculation and rhythm.
Emil Salto’s work often depicts a sort of non-space where he experiments with registers of time and spatiality and the perceptually turmoil in-between. Born in 1968 in Copenhagen, Denmark he graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. He has participated in numerous group shows around the world, published several artist books and contributed to various publications in Europe and United States. Recent solo shows include Fotogalleriet in Malmø, Peter Lav Galley in Copenhagen and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina. Recently he has made two large scale public commission in Denmark at the Helios Film & Culture House, Faaborg and the Niels Bohr Building, Copenhagen, 2018.
Bunny Shape belongs to a series of three animated paintings, where motifs of love and the cosmos are fluttering by. These motifs are animated like sequins of a kaleidoscope, whimsically flowing and changing as scale comes into question. Focusing on abstracting symbols, Bunny Shape is the artists way of deconstructing femininity through undefinable shapes that, when in motion, become an example micro/macrocosmic forms of love, identity, and biology.
Leah Gonzales currently teaches ceramics throughout the Bay Area, and received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She is a developer and collaborator of SPACE BAR art-collective based in the Excelsior, SF. Inspired by pop-culture and nature, Leah also enjoys creating myths and story-telling.
Insatiable by Joanne Easton, 2016/2017
Insatiable is a stop-animation loop made using PowerPoint. I used this ubiquitous presentation program for its visual storytelling possibilities to display images of scenes
made in the studio. Many of the scenes depict altered NASA images and stock imagery. This piece is part of a series of works and inquiry that ask whether we, as humans, can explore and seek comprehension without conquering? Also, known as Finder’s Keepers.”
Joanne Easton is an interdisciplinary artist working in Oakland, CA. Easton’s installation, drawing, poetry and presentation videos address larger social and environmental issues, like land use and competing perceptions of climate change. She has been an artist-in- residence at Vermont Studio Center, VT and Kala Art Institute, CA and has exhibited locally and nationally. She is a studio member at Real Time and Space in Oakland and an artist guide at the David Ireland House.
The Curator
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She began curating for the San Francisco branch of the Peephole Cinema in 2015. Klein is the co- organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage, online and the New Jersey Center for Visual Art in Summit, NJ. In 2008 she founded the internationally touring screening program Stop & Go which showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. Her work has screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, Tweetakt Festival in Utrect, NL, Anthology Film Archives in New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, HR. Recent commissions include an animation for the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. Currently Klein is a Media Arts Residency Fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.
When Time Moves Faster (2016) 6:35 by Anna Vasof
Among other things, Anna Vasof’s working method was influenced by pre-cinematic devices, stemming from her fascination with the movement of photographic images. These only appear animated given our persistence of vision. Vasof cites the zoetrope, a device that filled people of all ages with wonder at fairs of old, as an example of this phenomenon.
Anna Vasof is an architect and media artist. Born in 1985, she studied architecture at the University of Thessaly (2010) in Greece and Transmedia Art (2014) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2004, her videos and short movies have been presented in several festivals, some of them winning distinctions. She’s currently writing a Ph.D. thesis about an animation technical that she develops and a the same time working on designing and building innovative mechanism for producing critical and narrative videos, actions and installations.
The Anamorphosis Trap (2008) 2:35 by B. Shimbe Shim
Drawing on the construction by taping to build an unknown dimension, Stepping on the tiny gap in the illusion of perspective, Summoning the red dummy of what you see.
Shimbe is an award winning filmmaker and media artist. He majored in Experimental Animation at CalArts, and has expanded his artistic domain to various fields of art through film and animation. His works include, “The Wonder Hospital” – an animated film, “Mosquito” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ music album art works and videos, and “Futurama” – TV animation series. His films have shown at festivals around world getting multiple awards from SXSW, LA Film Fest, SIGGRAPH, and Anima Brussels, etc. He’s currently working as a film director and teaching at California State University Long Beach.
DEAD END
A Pair of Futuristic Animations of Sobering Loss
Work by Naghmeh Farzaneh and Tim Roseborough
Curated by Sarah Klein
from February 5, 2018 – March 31, 2018
An animation short that provides and objective view of the future of our planet.
Naghmeh Farzaneh is an award winning Iranian filmmaker and animator. After finishing her BFA in painting in her hometown, Tehran, she found the stories she had to tell were bigger than the surface of a canvas. In her exploration for a new medium she began her first animated film. In 2011 she immigrated to the United States to continue filmmaking and earned her MFA in Animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Over the years Naghmeh has done extensive work in two-dimensional animation, collaborative works with independent artists and filmmakers, and served on the juries of several international film festivals. Naghmeh has served on the faculties of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges prior joining DePaul University.
Playtime is a computer generated video piece that explores the notion of childhood in our contemporary age. An empty playground serves as the stage for raising questions about what it means to young in the age of computer games and online interaction.
Tim Roseborough has performed and shown artwork at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 2012 and 2010 ZERO1 New Media Biennials, Pro Arts, Oakland and SOMArts and Root Division in San Francisco. His projects and interventions can be seen in publications including Artforum, Art In America, Hyperallergic.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Arts Monthly, SF Examiner, and San Francisco Bay Guardian. He was the inaugural artist in the Emerging Artists Program at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco and has been awarded residencies at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley; and the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco.
About The Curator
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She began curating for the San Francisco branch of the Peephole Cinema in 2015. Klein is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage, online and the New Jersey Center for Visual Art in Summit, NJ. In 2008 she founded the internationally touring screening program Stop & Go which showcases animations by visual artists and filmmakers. Her work has screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, Tweetakt Festival in Utrect, NL, Anthology Film Archives in New York, NY and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, HR. Recent commissions include an animation for the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. Currently Klein is a Media Arts Residency Fellow at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.
THROUGH NONSTANDARD DIALECTS
Work by Adebukola Bodunrin, Rachel Lin Weaver and Darren Douglas Floyd
Curated by Mat Rappaport
December 17, 2017 – February 4, 2018
Until One Day…explores the popularity of apocalypse fantasies. Respondents are queried: “How do you hope the world will end?” Their response is re-interpreted by the artist in the form of animation to create an unconventional portrait. These animated “apocalypse portraits” are then shot frame-by-frame with the respondent, face cropped off the screen, holding each frame of the animation loop. This whimsically morose “anthropological study” investigates the complex and unstable conflux of tragedy and fantasy.
Adebukola Bodunrin is a Nigerian-Canadian film, video, and installation artist who explores language, culture, and media. In her collage animations, she manipulates film using unorthodox manual and digital techniques in order to produce unexpected cinematic experiences. Bodunrin completed her Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her work has been screened or exhibited nationally and internationally at venues that include the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Festival Animator, Ok, Quoi? Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Black Cinema House. She has participated in studio residences at the Chicago Artists Coalition as a participant of the BOLT residency, and at the Chicago Cultural Center. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
The Long View is an ongoing experimental documentary / video art series that uses poetry to grapple with contradictions in deep personal memory due to drastic ecological flux and climate change in the subArctic regions of Alaska.
Rachel Lin Weaver is an artist working in video, installation, and performance. Her projects explore memory, resilience in the face of adversity, landscapes and people in flux, and ecological systems. She is influenced by her upbringing in rural communities in poverty, and she creates projects that contemplate the collision of the personal and impersonal, the physical and metaphysical, the scientific and the ecstatic. Weaver currently lives in Appalachia, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies at Virginia Tech. She is curator and director of Cinema Reset, the new media program of the New Orleans Film Festival.
Darren Douglas Floyd’s work engages with digital and analog motion picture technologies to explore narrative and compositional interests through time and
motion. Using self-portraiture as a starting point, Floyd combines narrative and documentary techniques with letter writing, travel documentary and visual experimentation to create composited works of motion picture art. In Floyd’s words…”I am a slow artist. I make things I never show. I switched from a camera to a 3D scanner as my primary image-gathering tool to make pictures that I can look at on every side. This made me into an animator, reluctantly. Then I got sick, which made me even slower. The images have been piling up. This is one of them. I was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer at the age of 43. The doctors were surprised because it’s an old man’s cancer. It was so unexpected that the doctor didn’t recognize the tumor as cancerous, he just kept calling weird. In order to survive cancer you have to fight. As it turns out, my will to live isn’t that strong. My art career would have to get a lot better for this to be worth it. Cancer always comes back. The bigger trick is surviving the return. Supposedly, getting a dog helps. So does exercise and becoming a vegan. I’m doing what I can.”
Darren Douglas Floyd was born in Ann Arbor, MI in 1972. He received his B.A. in Women’s Studies from the College of Wooster in 1994 and his M.F.A. in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in 2001. Darren is a moving image artist with a diverse studio practice that combines 16mm film, digital video and 3D animation. His creative practice redeploys subversive feminist production strategies to interrogate masculinity. Darren has been accepted to several prestigious artist residencies including Yaddo, I- Park and the Millay Colony for the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the AC Institute,
CANADA, Video Dumbo and Gallery 138 in New York City and screened in many group shows and film festivals. He is an Assistant Professor of Video, Digital and New Media at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN
Mat Rappaport’s artwork has been exhibited in the United States and internationally in museums, galleries, film festivals and public spaces including the United Kingdom and the former Yugoslavia. His current work utilizes mobile video, performance and photography to explore habitation, perception and power as related to built environments. Rappaport is a co-initiator of V1B3 [www.v1b3.com], which seeks to shape the experience of urban environments through media based interventions.
Rappaport has published essays in the iDMAa Journal and a chapter in the book Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media, Art and Social Practices by Rutgers University Press.
Rappaport’s photographic work is included in the Midwest Photographer’s Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. He has received fellowships from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Howard Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Montgomery County Ohio Cultural District, and University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. Rappaport received his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Rappaport is an Associate Professor at Columbia College in Chicago.
PRECIOUS INFINITE
from November 7th to December 16 th, 2017
Reflections on Tradition and Cycles
Films by Elisabeth Nicula & Antonius Bui
Curated by Sarah Klein & David Kwan
In this collection of short films, two artists play on normative views of nature and tradition to evoke constant forces of change in climate and culture. A series of landscapes lulls viewers into the seemingly commonplace, only to frame the natural cycles within. A dance in a deconstructed garment calls into question notions of dress and identification. These works acknowledge the impactful but fleeting moments in the long now.
Aspects of Geological Time is an Internet-based project about the long scale of the universe. Presented here in three looping GIFs, Nicula’s work meditates on the cycles within nature and our smallness in their wake.
Elisabeth Nicula is a multidisciplinary artist from Norfolk, Virginia, whose work is in conversation with nature. She is interested in the sense of place, self-engendered by the landscape; in abstracted scales of space and time; and in combining these to formulate a bearable approach to climate change.
The Ao Dai is a traditional Vietnamese silk tunic worn usually by women and sometimes men. For the performance video Ao Dai, Antonius Bui creates a modified Ao Dai garment using a mass-produced bamboo hat and strands of raffia. Bui appropriates the traditional tunic to comment on gender and identity and to reflect on the invisibility and hyper-visibility of being a queer person of color.
Multimedia artist Antonius Bui creates sustainable fashion, cut paper installations, prints and more. Bui is a recent graduate from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Honors include fellowships from Kala Art Institute and Halcyon Arts Lab. Commissions include Lululemon Lab and Josie Natori for New York Fashion Week. Bui’s current project is Major-Minor, a platform for queer and trans people of color to be seen, heard and celebrated.
The Curators
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated for Root Division Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Rhodes & Fletcher, San Francisco, CA and the Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage. Recently she co-curated Doppler Extended Play: A Program of Time-Based Art for the New Jersey Center for Visual Art, Summit, NJ. In 2008 she began curating the animation program Stop & Go that features stop-motion works by visual artists and filmmakers. She recently completed touring the fourth installment of the show called Stop & Go: Made From Scratch.
David Kwan creates visual music works for installation, screenings and performance. Adapting environmental and found sounds and imagery, he uses combinatorial and iterative techniques to create shifting light, colors and spaces. He has presented work at the Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts and Mission 17 in San Francisco; Jack Straw New Media Gallery and 4Culture in Seattle; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb; General Public in Berlin. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he teaches in art and music and produces for radio. Along with partner Sarah Klein, he is co-producer of the Stop & Go Animation series and co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange.
A trio of films that carefully examines play; by reconfiguring, and relocating once discarded images, building layers, and creating new meaning. A hockey game is replayed using erasure and a lyrical hand painted line to examine the beauty and rhythm in this bloody sport. Another buries generations’ past evening entertainment in the garden and unearths new complex stories for bedtime. Colors unlike anything we relate to dirt, sublime in their secret history. The last creates infinite intricate collages from photocopied engravings, sending silent era film heroines into thickets and swarms to discover hidden corporeal messengers.
Night Hunter by Stacey Steers showcases two one-minute clips from her handmade film composed of more than 4000 collages. The actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. Night Hunter evokes a disquieting dreamscape, drawn from allegory, myth and archetype. Music and sound (on originally full-length film) by Larry Polansky.
Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Her recent work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, lyrical narratives. Steers’ animated short films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, New Directors New Films (New York), IFFR Rotterdam, Locarno IFF, MoMA and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.).Stacey Steers is a recipient of major grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital and the American Film Institute. She lives and works in Boulder, CO
Spank Shot “While waiting for a spanking, I watched hockey.”
Gina Kamentsky creates kinetic sculptures which exist in the somewhat chaotic and messy real world and animated films for the screen where gravity is a bit less of a concern. Her current artistic concern involves invoking the sweet spot where representation and surface push and pull each other like a two-headed lama. She is pursuing this by drawing and painting images directly on film stock, a technique, known as Direct Animation.
Phosphene Phantasmagoria The storybook is closed, the lamp extinguished, the images of the day recede, yet before sleep takes hold bright lights dance and flicker behind the eyelid, as if projected onto a miniature screen. If you look closely interwoven in the small explosions of color are the fragmentary remains of nursery rhymes. Menacing, absurd, surreal. It is time for the phantoms… a moment when images stored in the unconscious return in bursts of biophotonic light to construct their own stories: playful yet disturbing revenants.
This work has been created from old lantern slides made for children that were photographed onto 16mm which was subsequently buried, exhumed and reanimated.
Charlotte Pryce has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Born in London, Charlotte Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London and completed an MFA in Fine Art/ Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films have screened in numerous festivals including Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Ann Arbor and London. In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglas Edwards Award for Best Experimental Cinema Achievement, and in 2014 she was the recipient of Film at Wits End Award from the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
http://www.charlottepryce.net/
Laura Heit is a multidisciplinary artist who has lived in Portland, Oregon, since 2011. Her films and installations have been seen at; Adams and Ollman, Portland, The Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, Boise Art Museum, She Works Flexible, Houston, REDCAT Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MOMA NYC, Millennium Film NYC, Pompidou Paris, TBA Festival Portland, and the Guggenheim Museum. She was a 2016 Oregon Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow and has received grants and awards including; Artist Project Grant Regional Arts & Culture Council including the 2014 Innovation Award, Henson Foundation (2009, 2014), ARC California, Illinois Arts Council, Puppeteers of America, Thames and Hudson, The British Council, and the Mac Dowell Colony. She was the co-director of the Experimental Animation Program at Cal Arts, and currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
The Peephole Cinema Collective is artist-run and artist-curated. The filmmakers screening this month have contributed to keeping the project running in three cities: New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. This program was originally created and installed at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2017. Special Thanks to David Dinnell. The Peephole Cinema began in 2013 in San Francisco, with an interest to highlight short filmmakers and animators and to engage the public in a unique way.
In 7 Light-Years, Geiser explores time and distance through found images from early cinema, botanical illustrations, and miniatures. The woman in the film is suspended in elliptical time, caught between worlds.
Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, performance, and installation. Her work is known for its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects. ”Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” (—Holly Willis)
Geiser’s films have been presented at the Whitney, MOMA, LACMA, the Guggenheim, Redcat, the Wexner Center, the Centre Pompidou, and at numerous festivals nationally and internationally. The Red Book was selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and her films are in MOMA’s permanent collection. Geiser has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award. Geiser lives in Los Angeles, where she is Co-Artistic Director of Automata, an artist-run performance gallery. She is on the faculty of the School of Theater at CalArts.
A visual exploration of the assembly-line logic that defined work and leisure in the early twentieth century, composed from industrial and entertainment films of the 1910s-1940s.
Allison de Fren is a media maker and scholar with a predilection for media archaeologies and performative objects. Her work often explores the intersection of technology and gender. She is an Assistant Professor in the Media Arts & Culture Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
A quartet in the celestial sky brings emotion to the watchful eye. Created from silk screen prints this cameraless animation can be viewed all at once or by selectively focusing on just one segment at a time.
Sarah Klein is an artist, educator and curator based in San Francisco. She creates narrative and abstract stop-motion animations with paper cutouts and live-action footage. In her print based work she reveals hidden animations through common and uncanny forms.
She has presented internationally in galleries, museums, media outlets, and film festivals including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia; General Public in Berlin, DE; Aurora Picture Show, Houston, Texas; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and Mill Valley Film Festival, California. She has received awards from Zellerbach Family Foundation, Awesome Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Chez Panisse Foundation. She is the founder of the Stop & Go animation festival, illustrator of the Local Foods Wheel and curator for the San Francisco branch of the Peephole Cinema.
www.sarahklein.com
www.localfoodswheel.com
Composite, Sketch for, 2017, New York by Toby Lee
The composite sketch is an act of translation — from face, to memory, to language, to face. The drawing that emerges is also a question: When we picture in our minds someone we love, hate, desire, or fear, what exactly is it that we see? And what does it see in us?
Toby Lee is an artist and scholar working across video, installation, drawing and text. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, and is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
A film inspired by the ideas of “looking back”. Orpheus was granted permission to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld provided he did not look back. At the last moment, he turned to her.
Laurie O’Brien is a multidisciplinary artist working with video, installation, performance and animation. Puppets serve as an entry point for an investigation of contemporary ideas around deception, dual identities and alternative worlds. She received her MFA from Cal Arts and lives in both Brooklyn and Rochester, NY. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Media at RIT in the Photography Department. She is the founder of the Peephole Cinema.
This is an expression of an underlying sense of alarm that pervades my everyday life in 2017.
Susan Simpson is a filmmaker, puppet theater director, designer and visual artist working with miniatures, puppets and manipulated video projection. She designs display cabinets, kiosks, toy theaters and other objects that open in surprising ways to reveal various wonders.
Since 2004 she has been the Co-Artistic Director, of Automata, an organization dedicated to puppet theater and other lost and neglected forms, with a storefront theater in Chinatown.
A Collection of Films by artists from Creativity Explored
Curated by Sarah Klein
May 18th – July 1st, 2017
Based in the Mission District since 1983, CE gives artists with developmental disabilities the means to create and share their work with the community, celebrating the power of art to change lives. The title of the show originates from Trevor Cartmill-Endow one of the artists working in the studios at CE. Trevor summarizes his work as being, “Rated E for everyone”. Saying “I really want everyone to see it.” So consider this your invitation to visit the Peephole Cinema a free public cinema showing media based works, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through a dime-sized peephole in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Archival Films from the Mission Media Arts Archive
—a glimpse into the 1970s and 80s Mission District–
Curated by Sarah Klein
Three short films (a youth council strike, a day in Dolores park and a night of low-rider cars and Cholo pride) represent the teenage, working class and Latino culture during that time. The films come from the Mission Media Arts Archive a collective of filmmakers, Ray Balberan, Ginger L. Godines and Vero Majano who believe that by showing these films to contemporary audiences, we all collectively preserve a past Mission.
Mission Life (film still)
The familiar sights of Dolores Park and Mission High School stand out among images of families, street gamblers and musicians in a film capturing an early 1970ies Mission District.
Sears Picket Line (film still)
Film footage of the Mission Area Youth Council members picketing Sears to demand jobs and respect.
Black Orchid Lipstick gives us a glimpse into the social scene of teenage girls in the Mission District on a weekend night. This film was originally presented as a video installation in Two-Four Home Girls, Circa 1980 as part of the Solo Mujeres show at the Mission Cultural Center in 2010.
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated for Root Division Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Rhodes & Fletcher, San Francisco, CA and the Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage. Recently she co-curated Doppler Extended Play: A Program of Time-Based Art for the New Jersey Center for Visual Art, Summit, NJ. In 2008 she began curating the animation program Stop & Go that features stop-motion works by visual artists and filmmakers. She recently completed touring the fourth installment of the show called Stop & Go: Made From Scratch. www.sarahklein.com www.stopandgoshow.com
Video by Jeremy Rotsztain, Takashi Ohashi & Kynd
Curated by Victoria Scott
from February 15th – April 6th, 2017
Still from Electric Fields I (Jeremy Rotsztain, 2014)
Electric Fields I (Jeremy Rotsztain, 2014, 01:30), belongs to a 3-part series of software- generated animations that blend virtual worlds and abstract painting. Each animation embarks on a slow, meandering trip through an infinite world filled with colorful software-generated forms. Morphing and expanding, the gesture-like forms simultaneously appear as brush strokes and fields of digital information. Virtual cameras, cartesian perspective, parallax and atmospheric perspective elicit the sensation of floating through a painterly environment.
Jeremy Rotsztain is a Canadian-born artist and software programmer working with computer graphics to explore new modes of abstraction—across video installations, virtual reality worlds, mobile phone applications, and digital prints. Jeremy holds a Master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, New York Hall of Science, Grimmuseum, Festival Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal, and New Forms Festival. Jeremy lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
nakaniwa (Takashi Ohashi, 2016, 03:58) is an abstract animation which uses formal repeating rules; “overlap”, “continue”, “chase”, etc. to create a dynamic moving composition of colored objects. The complex repeating motions of these colorful forms balance feelings of ease and tension, and create a connection with the growth energies of natural phenomenon.
Takashi Ohashi is a Japanese motion graphics designer and animator, who researches the limits and extremes of words, letters, diagrams and visual music. His acclaimed animations have been screened at film festivals and featured internationally in online and print design and culture magazines, including; white-screen, Stash, onedotzero, motionographer, DOTMOV, gizmodo, cartoonbrew and the Creators Project.
Exploring the borders between computer graphics and painting, Nemumel (kynd, 2014, 02:38) starts with an empty sheet of a paper, which is gradually taken over by a square, referencing the paintings of Kazimir Malevich. The surface is repeatedly marked with chaotic dripping colors, which then finally loops back to blankness and tranquility.
Kynd, is a Japanese artist/designer, based in San Francisco. Trained as a fine artist in traditional oil-painting techniques, he now creates complex computer algorithms that generate the lush effects of traditional watercolor, oil painting, and mark-making. His work has been featured extensively in both print and online journals, including; CreativeApplications.Net, Wired Magazine, postmatter, gizmodo, and designboom.
Victoria Scott is a visual artist working between sculpture and digital media.
Recent projects include constructing material representations of conceptual objects that exist in simulated digital environments, the public commons and in the space of cultural imagination. Her process involves working with electronic media and physical materials to create simulated and real site-specific installations, sculptures and images.
Scott has exhibited at galleries, and museums throughout North America and Europe, including the Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), San Jose Museum of Art (California), the University of Toronto Art Centre (Canada), Kasia Kay Art Projects (Chicago), Galleri Enkehuset (Stockholm), and the 2010 01SJ Zer01 Biennial (San Jose). She lives and works in San Francisco.
The work of the Philadelphia-based experimental animation collective OOF
Wig-Wag is a theatrical term for a warning light located above the entrance/exit door to indicate when shooting ends.
Animations by Harvey Benschoter, Amy Cousins, Jennifer Levonian, & Jacob Rivkin
Curated by Sarah Klein
OOF was founded in 2012 and holds curated screenings by both emerging and award-winning animators. Their objective is to share the craft of animation with the public and present a networking opportunity for Philadelphia-based animators.
Molds by Harvey Benschoter, 2016
An animated mosaic made from images of Jello molds.
Texas Hellfire by Amy Cousins, 2016
Texas Hellfire is made from cut outs of Texas Lantana flower petals and leaves moving across headlines from a small West Texas town in the 70’s. The image shifts fluidly from flames to flowers, grouping and regrouping, while conflicting dates and clashing headlines in the background set the stage for an abstract questioning of who records history and who decides what is beautiful, what is sinful.
Little Skeleton by Jennifer Levonian, 2016
Hand-drawn in candy colors, Little Skeleton is the true story of an eerie coincidence that occurred after a family received a Day of the Dead figurine in the mail. The animation describes a moment when the uncanny interrupted everyday life to unsettling effects.
Floating Archives by Jacob Rivkin, 2016
Floating Archives is a series of animated vignettes based on photographs and etchings that re-imagine the labor, leisure, and obscured histories of the of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia from 1850 to today.
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Jennifer Levonian makes animations and paintings in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited across the United States, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Asheville Museum of Art, Asheville, NC; the Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA, and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD. She has attended residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In 2009, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. www.jenniferlevonian.com
Jacob Rivkin is an interdisciplinary artist living in Philadelphia, PA. His animations and video work have screened nationally and internationally, including at the Animation Block Party in Brooklyn, NY, the Arlington Art Center in Arlington, VA, and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. www.jacobrivkin.com
Harvey Benschoter is an animator and filmmaker. His work has been shown at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, The New Museum in New York, The Institute Of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, The British Film Institute, and many others. He lives in Philadelphia. www.cargocollective.com/harveybenschoter
Amy Cousins is an interdisciplinary artist from Houston currently living in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and a BFA in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work explores issues of queerness and normativity within the entanglements of identity, desire, and societal pressure. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Australia, and Scotland, among other locations. In 2016 she was the recipient of the Curator’s Choice Award for Beyond the Norm: An International Juried Print Exhibition. www.amycousins.com
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated for Root Division Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Rhodes & Fletcher, San Francisco, CA and the Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage. Recently she co-curated Doppler Extended Play: A Program of Time-Based Art for the New Jersey Center for Visual Art, Summit, NJ. In 2008 she began curating the animation program Stop & Go that features stop-motion works by visual artists and filmmakers. She recently completed touring the fourth installment of the show called Stop & Go: Made From Scratch. www.sarahklein.com www.stopandgoshow.com
Three experimental video shorts that depict both real and simulated alien landscapes
Video by Alice Dunseath, Kristin Lucas & Rebecca Najdowski
Curated by Victoria Scott
November 25th – December 31st, 2016
Still from An Interpretation of Perception, (Alice Dunseath, 2015)
Raw EEG data and topographical data graphs were an inspiration for the real world crystal and liquid formations in An Interpretation of Perception, (Alice Dunseath, 2015, 00:49). This intensely colorful animation interprets the organic rise and fall of brain waves as both familiar and otherworldly growths: sharp and erratic movement for the Beta waves and slow and milky for the Theta waves.
Still from: Lo-Fi Green Sigh, (Sarah Lucas, 2004)
Shot on location at Biosphere 2 and in the surrounding Arizona desert, Lo-Fi Green Sigh, (Kristin Lucas, 2004, 01:12 – excerpted from 03:00 original), is a playful pastiche of science fiction movie conventions. With its retro-futuristic architecture, eerily artificial interiors, and otherworldly landscapes, Lo-Fi Green Sigh merges B-movie science and science fiction, with echoes of Roswell, alien life, and extra-terrestrial feedback.
Still from: Give them Distance, (Rebecca Najdowski, 2016)
Give Them Distance, (Rebecca Najdowski, 2016, 01:30), explores how we comprehend the cosmos and our place within it. The video consists of thousands of images from slides discarded by a university Earth and Planetary Science department. The effect is an animated journey from earth, through the solar system and space, and returning as images of meteorites that have fallen to earth.
Alice Dunseath is a London-based filmmaker and animator. She works with materials, liquids, chemicals, crystals or elements that grow, change over time and have a life of their own. Alice has created title sequences for films and games, commercials for the BBC and Gucci and worked as a third assistant director on Wes Anderson’s ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’. She is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London and has screened and given talks about her work at film festivals, exhibitions and universities around the world.
Kristin Lucas is an interdisciplinary artist who explores everyday interactions with manmade systems and technologies in circuitous works that lie somewhere between reality and “reality”. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, including the 1997 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Artists Space, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Her videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and her expanded body of work is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York. Lucas lives between New York and Austin.
Rebecca Najdowski is a Melbourne-based artist working in photography, video, and installation. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, where she produced photographic and video works and created Rocinha Foto Project, a digital photography course for youth in Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela. Rebecca was the first Artist Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ. Her work has been exhibited and screened throughout the United States, and in the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Brazil, and Colombia.
Victoria Scott is a visual artist working between sculpture and digital media.
Recent projects include constructing material representations of conceptual objects that exist in simulated digital environments, the public commons and in the space of cultural imagination. Her process involves working with electronic media and physical materials to create simulated and real site-specific installations, sculptures and images.
Scott has exhibited at galleries, and museums throughout North America and Europe, including the Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), San Jose Museum of Art (California), the University of Toronto Art Centre (Canada), Kasia Kay Art Projects (Chicago), Galleri Enkehuset (Stockholm), and the 2010 01SJ Zer01 Biennial (San Jose).
www.victoriascott.org
Three experimental video shorts that explore the thin boundary between, air/water, and viewer/image
Videos by Allison Leigh Holt, Bijan Yashar, Toshi Anders Hoo, Eric Freeman & Liza Bender
Curated by Victoria Scott
October 9th – November 20th, 2016
Glass spheres, resembling a field of floating CGI bubbles, gently roll across the bright blue sky in Three Feet Above Earth, (Allison Leigh Holt, 2016, 01:00). Shot from under a glass tabletop on a sunny front lawn in LA, this short loop is taken from a 40-minute experimental study exploring light and surface.
Allison Leigh Holt (b. 1972) is a cross-disciplinary artist based in Oakland, CA. Working at the intersection of sculpture, video, installation, and performance, she pursues a dialogue between divergent ways of experiencing, comprehending, and describing reality.
Holt has received numerous awards from institutions including the U.S. Department of State (Fulbright Fellowship, Indonesia), Djerassi Artist Residency Program, & the San Francisco Arts Commission. Her work has exhibited internationally, notably at SFMOMA, Stanford University, Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Cemeti Art House (Indonesia) & the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Holt is Vice President of San Francisco Cinematheque’s Board of Directors.
Cycle, (Bijan Yashar, 2002, 01:26 ), is a meditation on attraction, repulsion, life, decay and death. In this study, water droplets are pushed onto the surface of the camera lens from a flower, resulting in an image that is both obscured and magnified.
Bijan Yashar was born in Tehran, Iran and has been living in California since 1979, when he and his family moved to the United States. A Bay Area-based video artist and photographer, Yashar has an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MA in Educational Psychology from UC Berkeley. His photography and video works have been exhibited and screened at Torrance Art Museum, Napa Valley Art Museum, de Young Museum, and Pacific Film Archive. http://www.bijanyashar.com
In Water Double, (Toshi Anders Hoo, Eric Freeman, Liza Bender, 2013, 02:12), complex emergent shapes are generated from splashing water by slowing down time, rotating and mirroring the footage. Patterns and shapes that are normally unseen to the human eye transform a natural action into a symbolic mandala as both a defiance and a celebration of nature and natural movement.
Toshi Anders Hoo is a San Francisco-based award winning media producer, designer and artist. His projects combine rich immersive media display and projection systems with real-time interaction. http://www.toshihoo.com
Eric Freeman is an electronic music producer, photographer and video artist. His recent video work is a combination of light painting and time-lapse photography. Eric is based in Somerville Massachusetts.
Liza Bender is a Berkeley-based multidisciplinary artist & designer who enjoys working in creative teams. She makes artwork that explore themes and metaphors found in the textures and micro elements of the natural world.
Work by Jake Fried, Miranda Javid, JD Beltran & Scott Minneman
Curated by Sarah Klein
August 1st through October 8th, 2016
Jake Fried is an animator based in Boston. Working with ink and white-out, gouache, collage and sometimes coffee he creates mind-bending animations that evolve at a frenzied pace. In Night Vision a gazing eye seems calm in a world of rapid transformations.
Jake Fried has shown his films widely including the Tate Modern, Sundance Film Festival and on Adult Swim. He currently teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
www.inkwood.net
Miranda Javid is a writer, animator and art-educator living in Los Angeles. Her surreal work explores disembodied worlds and transformation through the use of illustration, painting and GIFs. The piece Eyes was created on a whim with notecards and a mechanical pencil. The eyes glance, stare and blink when a pawing hand makes a close pass.
Miranda Javid has shown her work at Commune1 in Cape Town, South Africa, The Baltimore Museum of Art, CTRL = SHFT in Oakland, CA and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA. Her work is part of the viewing program at The Drawing Center in New York. She is a Kenan Fellow and a recipient of the Nancy Harrigan Prize, given through the Baker Artist Fund.
www.mirandajavid.com
JD Beltran + Scott Minneman
JD Beltran is an artist, filmmaker, writer, curator, designer, and educator. Scott Minneman is an inventor and innovative technologist who designs, engineers, fabricates, invents, and exhibits novel physical interactive devices for public spaces. Their collaborative, award-winning work, utilizing cutting-edge technology, taps into analog forms and blends the narrative and abstract in investigating how materials tell stories. Screening in the cinema is See is a filmic flipbook reworked of an excerpt of Beltran’s 2010-12 film Evolution.
Beltran and Minneman’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, Walker Center and in multiple Zero1 New Media Biennials. They have received awards from the Public Art Network Award and New Technological Art Award. Scott is faculty at the California College of the Arts, and Beltran is faculty at both the California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, and President of the San Francisco Arts Commission. They live and work in San Francisco.
www.jdbeltran.com
www.slminneman.com
Sarah Klein is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, curator and educator. She is the co-organizer of the Croatian Animation Cultural Exchange and has curated for Root Division Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Rhodes & Fletcher, San Francisco, CA and the Present Group’s Art Micro Patronage. Recently she co-curated Doppler Extended Play: A Program of Time-Based Art for the New Jersey Center for Visual Art, Summit, NJ. In 2008 she began curating the animation program Stop & Go that features stop-motion works by visual artists and filmmakers. Currently she is touring the fourth installment of the show called Stop & Go: Made From Scratch.
Reflections On Infinite Systems
Work by Benjamin Popp, Jodie Mack and Sabrina Schmid
Curated by Sarah Klein
May 24th – July 4th, 2016
Poster by Sarah Klein
Benjamin Popp is a filmmaker and animator. In Cinema is Structualist he uses still images of autumn leaves to create image sequences that when stacked one- top-of-the-other create colorful moving patterns. Ben’s interests and past workings in animation and moving image, have led him to working with simple image sequences to explore how they can be constructed into new and different representations of the world.
Benjamin Popp is a Portland, Oregon based artist. He has screened his work at the MUMIA Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Australian International Experimental Film Festival. Currently he runs the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival via the Northwest Film Center.
Jodie Mack makes handmade experimental animations that explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. Her work unleashes a kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life. In Screensavers she employs collage of mesmerizing computer graphics to highlight rapid technological obsolescence and the role of abstract animation in everyday life.
Jodie Mack is based in New Hampshire. Her work has screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film
Festival, Images Festival, New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. She currently works as an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College, where she co-organizes an experimental media series, EYEWASH, and serves as the 2015-16 Sony Music Fellow.
Sabrina Schmid makes experimental animations that explore the potential of abstract form. Coincidence 1 is a playful animation where varied geometric fundamentals rearrange themselves into endlessly changing abstract patterns.
Sabrina Schmid has been based in the United Kingdom since 2001 where
she teaches animation as Senior Lecturer in Animation at Teesside University and practices her own creative animation as a researcher at the Institute of Design, Culture and the Arts. Her background in animation includes study in fine art painting as well as in animation. Originally living and working early on as an independent filmmaker in Australia, she relocated in 1997 to work as freelance animator in Europe, initially in Switzerland, Austria, France and Germany. This then led her to teaching animation in the UK. Her work has been screened widely including the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival, London International Animation festival, Melbourne International Animation Festival and Punto Y Raya Festival in Spain.
www.movingimageart.com
Poster by Sarah Klein
Beth Krebs creates installations and media based work that celebrates the earnest, heroic, and usually botched human efforts at transcendence. In her video Plumb, excerpted for the Peephole Cinema, a fleshy blob undulates and stirs, slowly gathering momentum in an effort to lift off.
Beth Krebs is a recent transplant from Brooklyn to Oakland. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and alternative spaces in New York City and abroad including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum, Storefront Ten Eyck, the Cue Foundation, Real Artways, and the Elizabeth Foundation Project Space. In June she will have a second solo show with Station Independent Projects in New York. She is the recipient of grants from the Buchegger Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation and she earned her Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University in New Jersey. www.bethkrebs.com
Joanna Priestley has produced, directed and animated 27 films and one iOS app. Her work maintains a high level of porosity between serious exploration of boundaries and intuitive whimsy and she is dedicated to experimentation in technique, theme and content. In xo1 she juxtaposes abstract motifs inspired by tribal tattoos with ordinary still life objects.
Joanna Priestley is a Portland, Oregon based artist. Her films have been screened around the world including a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at many venues including the REDCAT in Los Angeles, Hiroshima Animation Festival in Japan, American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, Jenju International Film Festival in Korea, Masters of Animation Festival in India, Stuttgart Animation Festival in Germany and the Center for Contemporary Art in Poland. Priestley has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and American Film Institute among others. She graduated with a Masters in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts. www.primopix.com/biography.shtml
Jill Taffet is a moving-image artist who creates video installations, animated GIFS and new media. In Abiogenesis biomorphic shapes arise from the darkness, morphing and dissipating into never-ending life cycles. This piece was originally created at Harvestworks Artist-In-Residence program in New York City and is inspired by the theory that life can spring from non-living matter.
Jill Taffet is a San Francisco and Florida based artist. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibits at The Unpainted Fair in Munich, The Last Brucennial in New York, Interrupting Entropy: Selections From the Betlach Collection in California and InLight in Richmond. In 2015 Taffet was selected to be an Artist-In-Residence at Harvestworks in New York. She received her MFA at SFAI in San Francisco.
www.jilltaffet.com
Work by Eric Dyer, Johan Rijpma, Caleb Wood
Curated by Sarah Klein
February 15th – March 27th 2016
Poster by Sarah Klein
Eric Dyer is an artist, filmmaker, experimental animator, and educator. He has animated umbrellas, vinyl records and even a hot air balloon. In Coversong he finds motion hidden underfoot by animating manhole covers.
Eric Dyer is a Baltimore based artist. His award-winning films have screened internationally at numerous festivals, including the Chicago International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, South by Southwest, and the London International Animation Festival among many others. His work has been exhibited at the Exploratorium, the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, Prix Ars Electronica and the Cairo and Venice Biennales. He is a recent recipient of a Creative Capital award and is currently working on a tunnel zoetrope.
www.ericdyer.com
Johan Rijpma makes short animations that study systematic procedures and the unpredictability of everyday life. He sparks fascination in such common items as paper, plastic tape, balloons, slate and water. In Tegels he photographed street tiles and set them in motion to find their hidden melodies.
Johan Rijpma is based in Utrecht. He studied image and media technology at the Utrecht School of Arts. His work has received multiple awards and has been screened at an international selection of venues including the Eye Film Institute, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Animateka, Klik and Prix Ars Electronica. Currently he is a resident at JAPIC in Tokyo.
Caleb Wood is interested in the dynamism of what might be overlooked or mundane. He has an urge to get closer and understand things better and uses animation as a way to make the complex more approachable. In his work Bird Shit he used animated cellphone photos of bird droppings on pavement to reveal bird behavior.
Caleb Wood is an independent animator living in northern Minnesota. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and he has been honored with a residency at JAPIC in Tokyo. He has screened his work in numerous festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Eye Works Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival and the Stop & Go festival among others.
www.calebdwood.tumblr.com
Work by Felipe Castelblanco, Kate Nartker and Victoria Scott
Curated by Sarah Klein
January 2nd – February 14th, 2016
Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of socially engaged and new media art. Through urban interventions, video, performance, sculpture and networked installations, he creates participatory experiences of publicness that enable coexistent encounters between unlikely audiences and vast distances. Atlantic / Pacific is a video and performance project connecting two remote locations. In this piece he creates a fictional landscape that undermines our logic and sense of place. The walks in this piece were captured at different moments when the artist became a wanderer through spaces that are radically disconnected or that live in conflict with one another like Cuba and the U.S.
Felipe Castelblanco is a London based artist. His work has been shown at the San Diego Museum of Art, FAD festival in Belo Horizonte in Brazil, FIVAC festival in Camaguey Cuba, the Miller Gallery in Pittsburgh, PRACTICE Gallery in Philadelphia, Valenzuela Klenner Gallery in Bogotá Colombia and on street corners and in storefronts throughout United States. Felipe is the recipient of the 2013 John Fergus Post MFA Fellowship from the Ohio State University, the Starr Fellowship at the Royal Academy in London and a Kala Art Institute Fellowship in Berkeley.
Kate Nartker involves the use of digital tools and cinematic methods to introduce elements of time and movement through textile works. In Streetfair 1970 she creates an animation made from frames of quilted squares. Using a process called Trapunto the imagery (generated originally through film footage) is stuffed with batting to achieve a relief effect. The making of the animation resulted in an accompanying quilt 60 x 48 inches in length.
Kate Nartker is a San Francisco based artist. She received a Phelan, Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship from The San Francisco Foundation, as well as the Arts Award from the Northwest Area Arts Council. She has exhibited at The Contemporary Austin in Texas, Alter Space in San Francisco, Root Division in San Francisco and the Hordaland Art Center in Bergen, Norway. She received an MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2012 and is a lecturer in the Art Department of San Francisco State University. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco.
Victoria Scott is a San Francisco based artist. She incorporates electronic media, physical materials and interventions into her art practice. For the series Winnipeg Time Loops she explores the overlap of time and memory that occur when we revisit the place we lived as an adolescent.
Victoria Scott has exhibited widely in galleries and museums throughout North America and Europe, including the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City, San Jose Museum of Art in California, the University of Toronto Art Centre in Canada, Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago, Galleri Enkehuset in Stockholm, Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art in Canada and the ZERO1 Biennial in California. Project commissions include the San Jose Museum of Art, ZERO1: The Art and Technology Network and a Turbulence.org commission. She is also the recipient of several grants from both the Canada and Ontario Arts Councils.
A cinematic experience of glamorous places and nostalgic spaces
Work by Ellen Lake, Jacob Rivkin and Charles Woodman
November 2nd 2015 – January 1st, 2016
Curated by Sarah Klein
Poster by Sarah Klein
Ellen Lake makes films, videos, sculptures and installations. Her most recent projects explore the evolution of technology and combine vintage home movies with disposable media from today. In Queens Lane home movies from 1939 are edited and animated to give us a glimpse into the daily routines of a young couple of the not so distant past.Ellen Lake is an Oakland, CA based artist. She is a recipient of many awards including the Artist Project Grant from the City of Oakland’s Cultural Funding Program, Alternative Exposure grant from Southern Exposure, Experimental Media Arts Lab residency at Stanford University, Sarah Jacobson Film Grant anda Bay Area Video Coalition’s Mediamaker Award. She currently works at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.
Jacob Rivkin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on our experience of landscape through memory, desire, and autobiography. In Flats and Wagons he takes vintage postcards and moves them like theater sets to reveal new and unrealized landscapes.
Jacob Rivkin is a Philadelphia, PA based artist. His animations have screened nationally and internationally – including the Animation Block Party in Brooklyn, NY, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA, and Stop & Go a touring animation screening. He currently teaches animation in the undergraduate Fine Art department at the University of Pennsylvania.
Charles Woodman is an electronic artist working in video and expanded media. Roman Spa is one of a series of “video riddles” produced during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito that will eventually find use in a hospital waiting room.
Charles Woodman is a based in Cincinnati, OH. Exhibitions of his work include screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, Block Museum of Art, Chicago, IL, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Edison, NJ, American Dance Festival, Raleigh, NC, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. He was a founding member of the video performance group viDEO sAVant and has been a pioneer in the development of live cinema – real time video editing as live performance. He currently is a professor at the University of Cincinnati School of Art.
Crossings in color and motion
Work by Emily Alden Foster, Mel Prest and Leah Rosenberg.
September 21 – November 1, 2015
Curated by Sarah Klein
Emily Alden Foster incorporates a wide variety of materials and processes into her animated, live action videos and Zines. In Watercolor Animation Experiment #1 she paints tiny blue watercolors of dashes, blobs, dots and squiggles and then animates them to find their natural rhythm. The piece is an investigation for an upcoming animation to be expanded into many more colors and forms.
Foster has been making animations since the first day she owned a digital camera. Foster has shown her animations in This Will Never Work at Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Stop & Go: Made From Scratch (touring), Animated Type Showcase (Portland) and Art of Letterpress II at The Compound Gallery (Oakland). She also runs Womanzine Delivery Service and helps to organize the San Francisco Zine Fest.
Mel Prest is a non-objective painter whose work is focused on color and perceptual visual relationships. The inherent systems she creates in her work are intuitive and in colors she extracts her work from observation and accidents. In Untitled (Orange) she works with shapes and gradients to explore our perception of the color Orange and the afterimages of 2D and 3D.
Prest is an artist, curator and educator living and working in San Francisco and occasionally in New York. Recent solo shows include: COLOR CHANT at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (Oakland), MoonBrightChime at Galleri Urbane (Dallas), ZeppelinMetroMashup at B Sakata Garo (Sacramento). Prest has been awarded artist residencies at Ragdale, The Sam and Adele Golden Artist Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, The Wassaic Project and Vermont Studio Center, among others.
Leah Rosenberg makes paintings, paint-based sculptures, and cakes. Her process combines systems of accrual and layering techniques by way of color and stripes, to explore how our experiences and memories literally pile up. Her stripe paintings, prismatic sculptures and thematic cakes all aspire to delight our senses through a combination of every color, every day. In Oranges, Leah merges her interests in color and flavor by selecting items we consume and painting swatches of orange in attempting to match it to a paint color, piling up the arrangement until it fills the screen or falls apart.
Rosenberg moved to San Francisco from Canada to pursue her MFA at the California College of Art, where she wrote her thesis on the artistic possibilities of cake. She worked as the lead pastry chef for the rooftop coffee bar at SFMOMA where she applied her love of art, artists and cake-making to dream up desserts celebrating the museum’s work. Recent exhibitions include Happiness Is… at the Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga), Pairings at Galleri Urbane (Dallas) and Bay Area Now 7 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco).
Observing Orbits in the Known and Unknown Universe
Work by Benjamin Ducroz, Patrick Feaster and Jenny Vogel
August 10th – September 20th, 2015
Curated by Sarah Klein
Benjamin Ducroz creates dynamic videos and animations that explore form, pattern and movement. In Pendulum (2014) we feel that forceful pull of gravity as we observe the sway of a hand-made sphere in the New Zealand landscape. Watch carefully as you may feel a little dizzy afterwards.
Ducroz is an animator and motion designer based in Melbourne, Australia. His work has been exhibited and screened in galleries and festivals all around the world including the International Animation Festival (UK), Onedotzero (UK), Asian Art Biennale (Taiwan), Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin/Madrid).
Patrick Feaster is on a mission to resurrect long-vanished voices and sounds. He also experiments with visual sources and is currently animating historical astronomical charts. In a series of GIFs he takes still images of celestial observation (from 650 – 1650 AD) and makes them into moving ones. With this gesture he bridges a gap between reflection and motion.
Feaster is a specialist in the history, culture, and preservation of early sound media. He is a three-time Grammy nominee and co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative. His book Pictures of Sound, One Thousand Years of Educed Audio: 980-1980 was a 2014 Grammy Award Nominee for the Best Historical Album. He has a doctorate in folklore and ethnomusicology from the Indiana University in Bloomington, where he is now the Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.
Jenny Vogel examines the anxiety of alienation, the desires for communication and a sense of be-longing in a virtual world. In Makers of Myths (2010) she uses low-resolution photocopies and animation techniques to create a circling quad of gridded and identical planets. The spheres rotate continuously around a candle, placed on a table, suggesting a practical dimension to gravitational momentum.
Vogel works in video, photography and computer arts. Her work explores the world as viewed through new media technology using web-cameras, blogs and Google searches as source material. She received her MFA from Hunter College (NYC) in 2003. She is a 2005 NYFA fellow in Computer Arts and is currently Assistant Professor of New Media Art at the University of Massachusetts. Her work has been screened and exhibited in group and solo- shows in numerous locations and galleries: Storefront Gallery (New York), The Dallas Museum of Art (Texas), McKinney Contemporary (Texas), San Francisco Camerawork (California), Arnolfini, (UK), The Siberia Biennial, (Russia), Kunstwerke (Berlin), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York).
Three artists repurpose vinyl records and perform with turntables to make moving images
The Philosophy of Storms by Elise Baldwin (2014), Hit Parade by Gilbert Hsiao (2015), and Modern Vanitas by Katie Turnbull (2012)
Curated by Sarah Klein
June 27 – August 9, 2015
Poster by Sarah Klein
Elise Baldwin creates dioramas on vinyl records and combines them with found footage to create audiovisual performances. Her piece The Philosophy of Storms is inspired by her fascination with early meteorological science and storm watching, as well as our cultural shift from a faith-based society to a scientific one. In the Victorian era, storms were often interpreted to be signs from God or indications of coming end times. With the evolution of recording and communication technology, our collective perceptions of weather shifted towards scientific and predictive models. As always in her work, there is a tension between the natural world and the technological means that we use to measure and record it.
Gilbert Hsiao is an avid record collector and artist who makes perceptually based works in many mediums. For Hit Parade he painted linear patterns in fluorescent paint on over a 100 different 7” 45’s 78rpm and regular 12” 33 rpm records. This video is a document of an interactive installation he created at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2013-2014. In a room lit with UV light Hsiao welcomed the audience to layer and re-mix the records, creating undulating moving paintings.
Katie Turnbull mixes analogue and digital practices in a contemporary version of the modern-day zoetrope. For Modern Vanitas precise icons of life, death, time, digital technology and other iconography are printed on clear plastic disks. The disks are stacked in sequence giving the illusion of 3d form and then played on a turntable into infinity. This is piece was commissioned by Experimenta in 2012.
Sarah Klein is an artist, curator and educator. Her art practice includes live action and stop-motion animation and she uses paper cutouts to create narrative and abstract works. In 2008 she began the curatorial project Stop & Go (www.stopandgoshow.com) that features stop-motion works by visual artists and filmmakers.
Selin Balci and Nora Howell
Guest Curator Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell
Washington, DC based curator Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell presents recent works by Baltimore-Washington based artists Selin Balci and Nora Howell. These films, though very different in content, reflect on the challenges of modern day life. The viewer is confronted with invasive imagery of power struggles both human and environmental. Balci’s microscopic entities compete for their livelihoods in her visually dramatic biomorphic arena. Howell’s endeavor to free her face from the mysterious white goo is equally theatrical and reflective of the challenges of interaction. Both artists present the viewer with adversarial material to digest slowly in consideration of their place in the world.
Through performance-based sculpture and video, I explore ‘whiteness’ and what it means to be white. Racial Make-up came out of my personal reflection and response to teaching in the Baltimore city school district. I was one among dozens of young-white-female-new-to-teaching teachers in a predominately black student school district. In my effort to build trust and rapport with my students it became evident that no matter my political and social views on race and racism, my skin color would always inform how my students and I perceived of and interacted with each other. Racial Make-up is about accepting my collective white identity, balancing loving myself without denying the historical and contemporary oppression maintained by and through my whiteness.
Nora Howell is a white artist from Cincinnati. She is the program director of Jubilee Arts a community arts center in west Baltimore. She received her MFA in Community Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in studio art from Wheaton College and studied at the New York Center for Arts and Media Studies [NYCAMS] in New York City. She is a Hamiltonian Artist Fellow Amuni. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Hamiltonian Gallery and Bromo Seltzer Tower. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University, The Katzen of American University, Mrytis Art Gallery, The Maryland Institute College of Art, The H&H, Wheaton College, and Bethel Universit
In my work, I reference the fundamental, underlying social dilemmas and principles of our existence in an effort to understand and highlight social issues. My concepts are explored using living entities such as fungus and mold to recreate observable interactions and conflicts across the picture surface, where the outcomes reveal boundaries, edges and distinctive forms.
I use highly patterned and colored microscopic entities to create lushly visual and interactive biological arenas. I create competition for resources, territorial wars, and struggle for power and control among living organisms in an artificially created environment where all vital resources are restricted. This limited environment makes microbes compete for resources, dominate a particular area or become invasive and endanger others. When they share the same living platform, a conflict for resources arise and eventually this results with a borderline. The behaviors of the microorganisms resemble human actions and motives. Visually representing the maps and aerial scenes, these microbes act as metaphors for war and the human predicament.
Selin Balci uses microorganisms as her medium. She creates a biological arena on the picture surface by using microorganisms’ color, form and texture. Constantly discovering and combining the scientific material and mediums, Balci applies an acute scientific laboratory practice to create her work. Conceptually, she references the fundamental, underlying social dilemmas and principles of our existence in an effort to understand and highlight social issues. Balci’s many accolades include the prestigious College Art Association (CAA) 2012 Professional-Development Fellowship, So-Hamiltonian Fellowship in Washington, DC, 2013 Bethesda Urban Partnership’s Trawick Prize Finalist Award and Smack Mellon’s Hot Picks Artist Award. Numerous galleries have mounted solo and group exhibitions of Balci’s work including the Hamiltonian Gallery, DCAC (District of Columbia Arts Center), WPA (Washington Project for the Arts), ConnerSmith Gallery, Honfleur Gallery in Washington, D.C, Rush Arts Gallery and Smack Mellon in NY. Balci received her BSc from Istanbul University, BFA from West Virginia University and MFA from University of Maryland. She is currently teaching college level courses in studio art and art history in Maryland area.
Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell is a Washington, D.C. based curator, writer, and arts manager. She has curated several widely popular contemporary art exhibits including “Play by Play” in partnership with FLEX curatorial initiative and Project 4 gallery. In 2015 she explores curatorial practices through the residency programs of DC Arts Center and VisArts in Rockville, MD. A writer for all things art, her work has been featured with The Washington Times, Examiner.com, CBS Local DC online, Brightest Young Things, among others. In focusing on advancing the careers of local artists, she has developed professional development seminars as well as a residency program for local emerging artists. Additionally, she has worked with many cultural institutions including the Smithsonian Institution, the Walters Art Museum, the National Archives and the David C. Driskell Center collection at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her insights on art and culture have led to cooperative efforts with the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Annual Downtown Hyattsville Arts Festival. KBG earned her B.A. in Art History from the University of Maryland, College Park and her M.A. in Museum Studies from the George Washington University. She is the DC Regional Programs Chair of ArtTable in Washington, DC.
N Judah 5:30
“A melancholy train ride filled with small, rich moments.”
Was first premiered as a short at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival
Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker based in San Francisco and New York. He’s made many movies including most recently The Measure of All Things and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a live cinematic collaboration with the indie rock band Yo La Tengo. His documentary The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
Natalie So is currently the editor-in-chief of Edition Local. She is a writer, producer, and curator living in the Mission, and loves collaborating with other artists. Most recently she hosted and curated a 22-artist pop-up show out of her own apartment called New Geometries.
Kota Ezawa is a San Francisco-based artist who often reworks images from popular culture, film and art history, stripping them down to their core elements. His simplified versions remain easily recognizable and potent, the result of a process that illuminates the hold certain images have on their viewers. Working in a range of mediums such as digital animation, slide projections, light boxes, paper cut-outs, collage, print and wood sculptures, Ezawa maintains a keen awareness of how images shape our experience and memory of events. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Hayward Gallery Project Space, London; Artpace, San Antonio; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. He participated in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
The work of Chicago-based artist Jefferson Pinder, inhabits the body employing physical prowess and grueling endurance. His artwork reflects his interest in using the black body as medium to explore strength and politics. Particularly focusing avant-garde physical theatre and Afro-Futurism, he creates dynamic meditative events, allowing for communion between the performers with the spectators. Pinder’s work has been featured in numerous group shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Artin Hartford, Connecticut, and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, Poland. Pinder is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, and is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Letting Go of Falling In is a meta-video comprised of vignettes from work made over the course of two years filmed in diverse natural locations.
Bicoastal Sightlines
Curated by Justine Topfer and Laurie O’Brien
Sightlines by Miguel Arzabe, 2010
Shot through a telescope of the TransAmerica Pyramid from locations on public lands at the same elevation as the apex, Arzabe film portrays a unique perspective of San Francisco.
The Ferry by Michelle Harris, 2001
During her second year living in New York City, Michelle commuted to school and work on the Staten Island ferry. One foggy morning in 2001, she brought her camcorder along on the commute. How could she have begun to anticipate what would happen a month later?
Curated by Laurie O’Brien
San Francisco filmmaker Paul Clipson often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. Aiming to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, his films combine densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results. His films and collaborative performances have been presented at many festivals, galleries and venues around the world.
Giselle Brewton is a Northern California based artist, originally landing in San Francisco from Melbourne Australia to attend S.F.A.I. She works in the medium of film, photography and printmaking, rescuing discarded objects and materials, transforming their texture and form through images, exploring details that may otherwise go unnoticed. She is also Co-editor of “Bagazine” an Artist collaboration project exploring the assemblage landscape and modern subculture of Bagism and creative happenning.
Encyclopedia Pictura is Isaiah Saxon, Sean Hellfritsch and Daren Rabinovitch.
They’re a directing team working in film, art, game design, community building, and agriculture.The trio grew up in Santa Cruz County, CA and began collaborating on films in San Francisco in 2003. Their unorthodox, hands-on working style often includes direct creation in all aspect of production – writing, designing, painting, sculpting, animating, photographing, directing, editing, compositing, and scoring. EP has won numerous awards for their music videos, including Video of the Year from DA&D, UK VMA, Antville, and Spin Magazine. Esquire called them “The Directors of the Future.” From 2008-2011, EP led an effort to build a unique hillside neighborhood and farm called Trout Gulch. They lived and worked there along with 15 others. In 2012, they co-founded DIY in San Francisco, with Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein and OmniCorp Detroit co-founder Andrew Sliwinski. Saxon also volunteers as Media Advisor to Open Source Ecology. They are passionate about gardening, farming, construction, villages, augmented reality, science visualization, social ecology, technological empowerment, adventure, and country living.
http://encyclopediapictura.com/
Lorelei Pepi is an internationally award-winning independent animator, whose work ranges from the highly experimental “Grace,” to the narrative cartoon “Happy & Gay.” Her use of animation is as a tool of personal expression, engaging with projects that extend her voice in alternative ways. Her professional track includes roles as professor, creative director, commercial director, art director, animator, illustrator, sculptor, mold maker, and web-based interactive media creator.
She has been recognized with numerous grants, including the LEF Moving Image Fund, a Harvard Film Study Center Production Grant & Fellowship, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Fellowship Merit Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Illustration, and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Experimental Animation. She is currently teaching animation at Rhode Island School of Design, and has also taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Harvard University, Wheaton College (MA), the Rochester Institute of Technology, and California State Summer School for the Arts.
Peephole Cinema creator, Laurie O’Brien is an artist working in video, installation, animation, performance and puppetry. Her work is inspired by the outdated, the hand-made and the mechanical combined with the digital. She is particularly interested in dual identities, alternate worlds and our attraction to deception. She currently teaches Visual Media in the Photography Department at RIT in New York.
This show celebrates the premiere of two new films at the LA Peephole Cinema: Edge of Alchemy by Stacey Steers and Phosphene Phantasmagoria by Charlotte Pryce. The films will be playing 24/7 all year in the alley behind Automata. 504 Chung King Court, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phosphene Phantasmagoria, 2017. The storybook is closed, the lamp extinguished, the images of the day recede, yet before sleep takes hold bright lights dance and flicker behind the eyelid, as if projected onto a miniature screen. If you look closely interwoven in the small explosions of color are the fragmentary remains of nursery rhymes. Menacing, absurd, surreal. It is time for the phantoms… a moment when images stored in the unconscious return in bursts of biophotonic light to construct their own stories: playful yet disturbing revenants. This work has been created from victorian lantern slides made for children that were photographed onto 16mm which was subsequently buried, exhumed and scanned on a flat bed scanner.
Charlotte Pryce has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Born in London, Charlotte Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London and completed an MFA in Fine Art/ Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films have screened in numerous festivals including Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Ann Arbor and London. In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglas Edwards Award for Best Experimental Cinema Achievement, and in 2014 she was the recipient of Film at Wits End Award, and in 2015 she received the Gil Omenn Art and Science Award from the Ann Arbor film Festival. In January 2019 she presented a career retrospective at the Rotterdam Film Festival and her work was performed at the Bozar in Brussels and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Edge of Alchemy, 2017 (excerpt from 19:00 film). Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor, seamlessly appropriated from their early silent films, are cast into a surreal epic with an upending of the Frankenstein story and a contemporary undercurrent of hive collapse. In this handmade film, Stacey Steers selects sequences from early cinematic sources, prints the frames and re-contextualizes the action, allowing the ‘story’ assembled from appropriated images to evolve over time. She inserts her actors into newly imagined collage environments, built by hand from fragments of 19thcentury engravings and illustrations. Edge of Alchemy is the third film in a trilogy examining women’s inner worlds. Music by the Polish composer Lech Jankowski (Brothers Quay).
Cast: Mary Pickford: the scientist, Janet Gaynor: the creature, Animation, concept, design: Stacey Steers, Music and sound: Lech Jankowski, Editor: Antony Cooper, Additional effects and sound mix: Phil Solomon, Assistant animator: John Romano, Production assistant: Deborah Jordy, 35mm camera: Victor Jendras, Color Correction and 4K transfer: Patrick Lindenmaier
Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Steers’ animated films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, New Directors New Films, IFFR Rotterdam, Locarno IFF, MoMA, Lincoln Center and the National Gallery of Art. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.
Nancy Andrews & Gina Marie Napolitan
Both artists are known for their innovative experimental films and film-based performances.
The current program of films is curated by Automata Co-Artistic Directors Janie Geiser & Susan Simpson.
In The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes, brain scientist, Dr. Sheri Myes, uses herself as the test subject for sensory enhancement and acquires super-senses. As she sets out to develop ways to extend human sensory abilities, she is isolated by her obsessions and blind to the love, hate and self-interest that surrounds her. The film and web series is a hybrid of live-action, animation and song.
Nancy Evelyn Andrews makes films, drawings, books and objects. Andrews is a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in filmmaking. The Museum of Modern Art has collected six of her films, and her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliotheque Nationale and Franklin Furnace Archives. She completed her first feature film, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes, that premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2015. This project was then developed as a web series when The Strange Eyes of Dr Myes was one of ten projects chosen to participate in Independent Film Project’s (IFP) Screen Forward Labs.
The Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, Flaherty Seminars, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Film on the Rocks- Thailand, and others have presented her work. She was featured in the 2013 deCordova Biennial on exhibit. She is currently participating in Artists in Context’s “Artists’ Prospectus for the Nation” in the category of health, where she and other artists are bringing their aesthetic modes of inquiry to real-world situations, showing the value of drawing on knowledge from other fields and moving beyond conventional modes of problem-solving. Andrews is on faculty at College of the Atlantic.
https://thestrangeeyesofdrmyes.com
Blaxton’s Point. Changes happen in dark places. A woman stumbles upon an abandoned home and its history struggles to reveal itself.
Gina Marie Napolitan is an experimental filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist originally from Brockton, Massachusetts. Her animated films have screened at the Boston Underground Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive in New York City, LA FilmForum, Antimatter Film Festival, Black Maria, and numerous other venues in the United States and abroad. Her paintings, drawings, and collages have been exhibited in several small galleries and her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal. Gina has also worked as a puppeteer and video designer on several experimental theater productions at REDCAT and Automata. She received her BFA in Film/Video from Massachusetts College of Art and her MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts. She currently works as an academic video production wizard at the California Institute of Technology and regularly teaches DIY filmmaking and animation classes at Echo Park Film Center.
Ghost Algebra, Janie Geiser
Inconsolable Objects, Susan Simpson
In Geiser’s Ghost Algebra, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams. Using found and natural objects, rephotographed video, medical illustrations, and other collage elements, Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word “algebra”: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts.
Simpson’s Inconsolable Objects is a short animated film exploring states of agitation and unrest. Drawing on various source material, particularly comic book action sequences the film creates an abstracted experience of unease.
The June 17, 2106 Opening Reception at Automata’s Chinatown space featured projections by filmmakers Jodie Mack, Benjamin Popp and Sabrina Schmid, whose films are currently playing in the San Francisco Peephole Cinema, which is curated by Sarah Klein.
Nearly two hundred years before the invention of cinema, the peepshow, raree show, or boîte optique—a closed box with at least one peephole revealing a hidden “view”—was a form of both visual entertainment and optical experimentation. Peephole Cinema revives this unique viewing apparatus, along with the attendant tensions it produces between public and private, authorized viewing and voyeurism, and seeing and being seen, for those strolling Chung King Road. The films featured, Oculus Solus by Allison de Fren and One Eye by Laurie O’Brien, are reflexive meditations on the singular vision produced by the act of seeing with one eye. The peephole will be open and available to the public 24/7 for the next two months.
Oculus Solus (2014) A balletic reflection on the instrumentality of vision, composed for one eye from educational, industrial, and avant-garde films of the 1920s-1950s.
Allison de Fren is a media maker and scholar with a predilection for media archaeologies and performative objects. Her work often explores the intersection of technology and gender. She is an Assistant Professor of Media Arts & Culture in the Art History & Visual Arts Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
One Eye (2014) The implications of looking “in” and not “out” of a peephole. An interior exploration of surveillance, looking, and a lost eye with images from the Soibelman Collection and Magic Lantern slides from Visual Studies Workshop.
Laurie O’Brien is an artist working in video, installation, animation, and performance. Her work often focuses on the blurring of fact and fiction. A metaphor that continues to influence her work, the puppet, finds expression in unexpected forms with links to technology, identity, duplicity and deception. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Media in the Photography Department at RIT in Rochester, NY.
PAST SHOWS
A collection of videos showcasing Iranian artists. The title Hofreh is a Persian word for hole or cavity and can also mean eye socket.
Curated by Minoosh Zomorodinia
January 27, 2020-June 9, 2020
The Peephole Cinema in San Francisco is proud to present “Hofreh” a collection of videos showcasing Iranian artists who live and work in the cities of Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz and Khoramabad. The title of this show is a Persian word that translates to hole or cavity and also applies to the word for eye socket. It’s a fitting title for works that respond to the Peephole Cinema’s unique space: videos that loop inside a hole in a wall located street side on a building in the Mission District. In this show the artists express challenges of identity and gender and sometimes use their bodies as a natural set up to express the power of fertility and love. Curated by Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist Minoosh Zomorodinia this show brings together a collection of artists that are part of her extended community. In these works there are references to loss and societal expectations. Loss of the natural environment caused by urban development in Iran’s cities and the human struggle as it relates to societal expectations on women. The later, causes many to leave the country so they can live freely rather than satisfy their family’s demand or societies pressures.
Offering by Tara Goudarzi, 2008-2019
It was black at first
Just like a death of a tree
And I was dressed in white
Just like when I was born
By the vastness of the beach
The purity of my being experienced the blood of the earth
And then, I was green all over while released of all boundaries
In the “Offering”, I put on my veil since we have always been together, ever since I was 9, sometimes out of divine love and sometimes out of hatred. Now I only enjoy its purity, and its plainness, its whiteness. And I offer all of this to the endless greatness.
Tara Goudarzi (b.1978) is a visual art educator multi-disciplinary and environmental artistwho lives and works in Khoramabad, Iran. She received her B.A. in painting in 2009. Sheworks in performance, video and installation art. She has participated and collaboratedwith many artists in more than 26 Environmental Art Festivals since 2006. Goudarzi cofoundedthe ARTA Contemporary Art Institute in 2014. She is the organizer of Light ArtPerformance Events and the Homar Festival. Her works has been exhibited locally andinternationally in Singapore, India, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Korea,England, Canada, America, Romania, Mexico, Finland and Iran.
Hasht, (meaning number eight in Persian: ٨) by Majid Ziaee, 2017
In-between: Includes eight mysterious essences and hidden meanings in art and literature of Iran. Eights climate in Suhrawardi’s works are the agent between the two universes. In geometry and architecture, the standing of this number is between a square and circle, between sky and earth. A middle element, like a desert, pictures the border of existence and non-existence inside itself. The title Hasht is the number eight in Persian and stands for the eight motions in original work.
Majid Ziaee, born in Mashhad, Iran in 1982. He lives and works in Tabriz. He received a PhD in Art and Research, a BA in Crafts, and a MA in Islamic Art majoring Ceramic from Shahed University, Tehran, Iran. He is a faculty member of Tabriz Islamic Art University (TIAU). His medium is ceramic, emphasizing its use in the environment. He is interested in ephemeral works observing nature. His recent pieces includes working with natural elements found objects in nature and performance works. He has received several residencies at Global Nomadic Art Project of Yatoo Center in South Korea, France, and Lithuania.
Friendship by Atefeh Khas, 2019
Friendship is a different personal relationship that essentially involves a distinctive kind of concern for your friend, a concern that might reasonably be understood as a kind of love.
Atefeh Khas was born in Tehran in 1985. She received her MA in Art Research from Alzahra University, 2014, and BFA in Painting from Shahed University in Tehran, in 2010.
She has received several residencies and awards such as the Environmental Art Residency Program in South Korea in 2012, the Almaken 2nd International Contemporary Art Festival in Tunisia in 2016, Global Nomadic Art Project in Iran, Germany, France and Turkey in 2016 and 2017. Her works are published on the cover of the magazine “The Middle East in London”, University of London (SOAS) in 2015, the Yatoo-i Environmental Art Calendar 2015 and 2017. She has had her works exhibited in Canada, United States, Belgium, Romania, South Korea, France, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungry, Tunisia, Poland, Sri-Lanka, Turkey, Nepal and India.
A Stone Embryo by Nooshin Naficy, 2017
From “I Am Nature’s Child and Nature Is My Child” series and shown in the Third International Festival of Homar ARTA Contemporary Arts Institute, Khoramabad, Iran. Camera: Tara Godarzi and Sepehr Godarzi. Editor: Shahin Shabazi
Nooshin Naficy is an artist and educator. She was born in Isfahan, Iran to a large and cultured family in 1959. She went to Tehran to pursue theoretical and practical principles of painting in 1986. She is a founder of Baran Institute, where she has taught art to children and adults for twenty years. She is a member and instructor at the Painters’ Association of Isfahan. Since 2003, she has worked with the Rangin Kaman Institute for the Elderly as the painting instructor and Head of the Art Department. Naficy is a member of Godar collective in Isfahan since 2004. Her videos have been screened in Iran, South Korea, Romania, Hungary, England, Germany, USA, and Finland.
Bubbles by Setareh Hosseini, 2015
Girls suspended between staying and leaving, amongst the narratives planned by today’s lives.
Girls left back, or girls that count their dreams in the hidden celebration.
Girls who’ve come from crowds and silences.
Girls who’s secrets are bubbles, whose dreams are bubbles, and whose future are bubbles for them.
Girls of waiting.
– Based on a poem by Ahmad Shamlou
Setareh Hosseini was born in Tehran in 1979. She was touched by her mother’s art classes as music and painting was the atmosphere in their house. She pursued a B.A. in Graphic Design and M.A. in Illustration to continue her passion. She finds her way through different art forms using her skills to express herself, from illustration to photography and video art. Her works address women and their relation to Iranian society. A relation which is a conflict of traditional and contemporary cultural aspects. Diversity, integration, local, international and human relation with community or sexuality are main aspects in her art work. Hosseini has participated in many art festivals and biennials with her work been exhibited in Italy, France, Korea, and Iran.
Mirror Sky by Raziyeh Goudarzi, 2015
Every day we see many things around ourselves but never watch or notice them. I don’t know what the reason of not watching is…perhaps it has become usual for us.
Razieh Goudarzi was born in Khoramabad in 1987. She recieved her MBA degree in Executive Management in Tehran. She became interested in contemporary art when she was a teenager and participating in many group shows since. She is one of the co-founder and director of ARTA Contemporary Art Institute in Khoramabad where she organizes environmental art festivals, studio art classes, and education programs. She employs photography, video and performance art in her practice. Her work has been exhibited at the International Art Biennial in India and International Lake Velence Symposium in Hungary and her work has been shown in the United States, Romania, France, Germany, Hungary and Iran.
About the Curator
Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist, who sometimes curates exhibitions and organizes programs in non-commercial venues. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2009. Her artwork exposes and experiments with humanity’s relationship to the natural world. She employs walking as a catalyst to reference nomadic lifestyle, as well as colonialism. She earned her MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, and holds a Masters degree in Graphic Design and a BA in Photography from Azad University in Tehran, Iran. She is a member of Curatorial Council Committee at Southern Exposure gallery in San Francisco. She has received awards and residences from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Kala Art Institute, Ox-Bow School of Art andDjerassi Artist Residency Program. She is the recipient of an Alternative Exposure Award and a California Art Council grant. She has exhibited locally and internationally at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, SOMARTS, Pori Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, and ProARTS. Her work has received press coverage in SF Chronicle, Hyperallergic, SF Weekly, KQED, CityArts Magazine, and Tacoma Weekly News.
Frog Prince by Alyssa T. and Emily C.G.
Jurassic King by Kevin N. and Christopher Z.
Magic Tree by Jamielynn Q. and Sophia D.
Lion & Fleas by Daniel V. and Ayrton C.
Falling Man by Jordan H.
Bird Man by LaDainian B.
Sept. 13, 2019 – Jan. 27, 2020
Organized by Art Teachers Jennie Maydew & Laurie O’Brien. Special Thanks to LEAP (Lions Enrichment and Athletics Program) & the Bushwick SPACE Grant
About
In June, the Peephole Cinema founder, Laurie O’Brien, collaborated with Achievement First Bushwick Middle School students and their Art Club teacher, Jennie Maydew, to create a stop-motion animation workshop that resulted in six, original animations made by the students. For many, it was their first time making a film or animation.
Please join us in supporting young artists in Bushwick!
The Big Crossover @URL
Curated by Felt Zine & Maysles Cinema
August 1st-September 1st
FELT is an experimental internet art platform and artist collective. Its IRL and URL experiences examine digital activism, hip hop culture, race, gender, and class. Since the start of FELT in 2011, the collective has grown their small group of like-minded creatives to become an international movement that travels between the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa. The ethos and work of FELT, including the artists represented in this installation, are an exceptional contribution to the expanding realms of experimental film and video work in the current Internet Era. The works in this installation explore the process of translating personal representation, identity and environment into online contexts. It also allows for consideration of the mediation process between artist and audience created by digital and physical spaces.
“The Cave,” 2019, Mark Sabb
Photo Scans & Model by Mark Sabb.
3Daz, After Effects, NewGen.
Created from 3D models of Mark Sabb, this work engages with the seduction, rejection, and complicated relationships we have with the technology of social media. The imaging of the three dimensional and going through photography and video, the image technically become more facsimile. But does resemblance of form indicate a closer reflection of personhood? As the promise of cyber-utopianism continues to frame our realities, both online and IRL, this work exposes the ways in which the technology demands curatorial decision-making and a crafting of self-portraiture. Inspired by Plato’s Cave, an allegory that outlines one’s inability to recognize realms outside of our phenomenological or experiential understanding, Sabb encourages us to think about the false daily reality of our devices. In a time that has been declared a “post-truth” era in a moment of proliferated videos and photographs, at what are we ready to face reality if we wander out of our own internet “caves”? Or do we reject the harsh truth for the falsities that affirm our beliefs?
“Transcendance / 22050”, 2018, Fornax Void
Photo Scan & Co Direction by Lasse Kusk
Dress by Keisuke Dayoshi
Model: Kaori Udagawa
Blender, After Effects
Produced by FeltZine
Lasse Kusk collaboratively approached Fornax Void with the great idea to put 3D photographs he made in one of their 3D environments. Fornax took this opportunity to continue to work on one of their ongoing 3D music video projects; namely the video for their 2nd MilkyTracker track “22050” (now part of the Album Cyberspace Database). Different renditions of earlier states of the same environment were shown earlier in 2018.
Ty Jawn, 2019, Jawn Diego
Photo Scan By Jawn Diego.
Model: Ty Senoj.
Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D.
Jawn Diego’s “TyJawn” presents a universe engulfed by material riches and incessant forms of entertainment that persist in an otherwise gloomy world. The bodies have been stripped, broke, and disoriented in a metropolis that seems otherwise hopeless. Billetes’ TyJawn explores the intersections of self-actualization and wealth in an exaggerated (yet realistic) wordly environment.
Devon Moore aka Dev Moore, is a net artist, curator, creative technologist, and member of the FELT collective. Dev’s work incorporates technology, modern-day youth experiences, personhood, hip-hop, and more all while referencing components of tech culture.
The Curator
Annie Horner is a curator, filmmaker, and producer whose curatorial efforts in film have manifested in documentary film festivals and experimental screenings along America’s east coast. She is a collaborator at Maylses Cinema in Harlem since 2015 and practices filmmaking focused on short, experimental videos that explore the representation of nature in media and the effect of discreet film & video formats on perception.
The Peephole Cinema New York is pleased to present GIF Flicks in partnership with GIPHY Arts.
GIF Flicks is a series of GIF-length experimental films created in 2018 by artists regarded for their work across a range of mediums. All four commissions originally premiered last year at Metrograph Theater in connection with The GIPHY Film Festival and have since been adapted for the one of a kind viewing experience available only at Peephole Cinema. With just a minute to spare, allow yourself to be transported from views of cannibalistic doom, onto a stage with painted performers, deep down a feverish pink hole, only to land among a mirage of vocal felines.
The Filmmakers
Abbey Luck is an artist and director who works primarily in animation and sequential art. She has a permanent installation in the immersive museum Meow Wolf called the Infinity Spa, an infinity room filled with interactive LEDs. She was a storyboard artist and writer on Disney’s Pickle and Peanut. She also created storyboards, character design and backgrounds for Comedy Central’s Jeff and Some Aliens. She is currently working on her first graphic novel, Pig Wife. For over ten years, with her friend Sean Donnelly, she has run a boutique animation company called Awesome + Modest. They have made content for Esquire, AOL, The New Yorker, Chanel, ATTN, Scion, Genentech, FOX, Comedy Central, Mountain Goats, Spinto Band and more. They also did the animation for the documentary U2: From the Sky Down, Resolved, Last Play at Shea, No Cameras Allowed and Waiting for Superman.
Weeping Woman by Jaimie Warren, 2018
Jaimie Warren is a multidisciplinary artist and Co-Director/Creator of the community arts project and fake public access tv show “Whoop Dee Doo” (www.whoopdeedoo.tv). Warren is a NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, and has been awarded artist residencies in NYC with the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Pioneer Works, BRICworkspace, Abrons AIRspace, and American Medium. Warren is the recipient of the Baum Award for An Emerging American Photographer, and is a featured artist in ART21’s documentary series “New York Close Up”.
Warren has taught extensive workshop series’ with youth, adults and seniors. She has worked with NYC public schools and organizations including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art21 Education Dept., The Museum of Art & Design, The Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA Program, NurtureArt, the Dia: Beacon and Abrons Arts Center, and she has received a United States Presidential Teaching Award, presented by Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. in 2013.
http://www.dontyoufeelbetter.com
Pink Fever by Rebekka Dunlap, 2018
Rebekka Dunlap is an Interdisciplinary Artist specializing in Illustration, Animation, Comics and Narratives dealing with the emotional dream spaces that are wedged into our mundane everyday. Her obsession with the romantic horror of being alive has lead her to draw for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, TIME and the Indie Video Game success, CIBELE. Currently she is working on a Graphic Novel about Childhood Crossroads and learning about Ethical Hacking. (Insta: @rrebekkaa, RebekkaDunlap.com)
https://www.rebekkadunlap.com/
Tux House by Thu Tran, 2018
Thu Tran is a visual artist, producer, writer, and performer who makes short-form videos, video games, and comics. She is best known for Food Party, a fake cooking show for IFC. She has also made work for MTV, Museum of Moving Images, Super Deluxe, Babycastles, and Adult Swim. Thu is the author of Dust Pam, published by Peow Studio, and currently working on her second book for Peow. Her comics have also appeared in anthologies, š! #30 by Kuš! and Clubhouse 11 by Colorama. She spends all her free time looking at her cute cat.
The Curator
Dani Newman is the Director of Community at GIPHY. Her role involves optimizing artist’s works for GIPHY and connecting the thousands of verified digital artists using the platform to unique opportunities and to each other. Previously she served as an Art Director at GIPHY, overseeing the production of many original GIFs for top brands around the world. If you’re attempting to stalk Dani, you likely won’t be able to find her because of a supermodel with the same name, but all you really need to know about her professional persona is that she used to work at Tumblr.
very short films for a distracted world
from September 28, 2018 – April 11, 2019
The absurd nature of the internet, like life itself, can call into question it’s inherent value and meaning. Do we contribute to this ever-expanding universe of imagery as a means of creating purpose, seeking connection, or possibly as an act of rebellion against more traditional institutions? Often seen aside unrelated information, easily altered and repurposed, works shared and viewed within this space denounce context as a necessary feature for understanding and appreciating artwork. Does stripping these videos of their distracting environments detract from their intention? Or perhaps their ability to provide a respite in a sea of stimulation is just as important in the physical space as it is in the digital.
The Filmmakers
BABYLICK
Referred to by Vanity Fair as a “photographer specializing in the surreal,” Kelsey Bennett is noted for a style that depicts a “super-real life.”
@kelseybennett333
Sunset Living Room
Aleia Murawski is an award winning, fiction-based photographer whose work focuses on fashion and portraiture. Aleia attended the University of Fable, and received a Bachelor’s degree in Art with a specialization in Photography. Aleia’s work has been featured in international publications and media.
@aleia
Dreams by Sholim
Milos Rajkovic, a.k.a Sholim, is a video collage artist from Serbia known for his surreal animations that often reveal something new and unusual to the viewer, either by moving them through a strange space, or pulling back the surface of a familiar object.
@sholim
Mutualism
Albert Omoss is a director, designer, and artist. As a designer and artist his work often utilizes physical simulation, resulting in a surrealist blending of organic and inorganic. His pieces explore the fragility of the human form, the aesthetic complexity of physical processes, and the relationship between organisms and advanced technologies.
https:// www.instagram.com /albertomoss/
A Life Well Lived
Cool 3D World
https:// www.youtube.com/ channel/ UCzNZlJzmjomyl00 ewlxHqOA
@cool3dworld
Fluff
Beeple
@beeple_crap
Look
Hayden Zezula, aka Zolloc, is an artist and animator from Austin, TX currently living and working in NYC.
@zolloc
The Curator
Sam Cannon is an artist and director based in NYC. Her personal work focuses on the manipulation of time, space, and the female form. Living somewhere between still photography and video, her images explore the way we interact with never-ending moments in the age of the 15 second clip.
http://www.sam-cannon.com
NYU CINEMA STUDIES & PEEPHOLE CINEMA PRESENTS
ACUMULUS
Images intercepted on their way to the cloud
A Cinema Project by TMI Art Collective
Playing in Manhattan for One Week Only 24/7
Mon. Feb 18- Tues. Feb 26, 2019
720 Broadway
(Betw. Waverly Pl and Washington Pl)
About
You could call us meteorologists, because we are always watching the clouds. You might also call us sentries on watch over a frothing sea, measuring its evaporations, infinite images ascending to the foggy vault in the sky. But we are not content to be spectators. We have trained ourselves to use the net. A mesh of fine filaments, the net traps whole schools of images against the side of our browsing craft. Then comes the hard part: one of us, with a deft flick of the cursor, must initiate an algorithm of an appropriate sharpness to intercept our bejeweled prey. The newly captured images snap and writhe in our content pen. They know they will not last long in this state, trapped in a liminal place, neither here on earth nor in the cloud. They are acumulus, a tangle of specimens in transit, rarely appearing whole and uncorrupted. (Our algorithms are not yet as precise as we would like.)
We thought you might like to see these rare beasts of the digital depths, before they are released. They look different when you see them without the assistive technology of the smartphone. Some are so compressed, they are reduced to a thin film of condensation. Others are covered in parasites of code. Still others, because they bear witness to human depravity, appear merely as elements of an image–a cheese grater, a glowing lump, a half-blown selfie, the torn tail of a shrimp. We embrace the lumpen visuality of our catch. Indeed, we expressly seek pictures that are scorned, lost, secret, recently deleted. You might want to think about where you dispose of yours.
To live today demands continuous content capture. The society of the spectacle has given way to the society of the receptacle. It is hard to find surprises in this era of constant creation. To encounter the unexpected, you have to squint and peep.
About TMI Art Collective
TMI was formed some time ago, in a room full of windows. Its members, hailing from Europe, Canada, and the United States, were brought together by a common interest in exploring the intersecting domains of art, money and infrastructure. While acknowledging that loss is inevitable, their work is guided by a wistful belief in the transformative possibilities of collaboration.
TMI Artist Collective
Anna McCarthy teaches Cinema Studies at NYU and is a collector of animated GIFs. In her free time she handcrafts her own GIFs using organic and locally sourced materials. To view a selection visit dwgiffith.org
Laurie O’Brien is an artist working in video, installation, animation, and performance. She is interested in hybrid forms of expression that combine and defy categories. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Media in the Photography Department at RIT. She lives in both Brooklyn and Rochester. laurieobrien.com
Charlotte Butler is a Cinema Studies MA student at NYU. Originally from Toronto, she will be returning there next September to start her JD at the University of Toronto. She wants to explore the intersection of film and law. Charlotte has curly hair.
Lauren Treihaft is a PhD student in the Cinema Studies department at New York University’s Tisch school of the Arts. Her doctoral research centers on the cinematic representation of time and the temporal mediation of the present world via digital screens and technology.
Daryl Meador is a filmmaker and PhD student in Cinema Studies at NYU. She studies and visually documents the weird ecologies of Texas. www.darylmeador.com.
Valerie Van zuijlen www.valerievanzuijlen.com
Aster Hoving is a graduate student in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, currently on exchange at New York University. She is an editor for Soapbox, journal for Cultural Analysis, and works at bookshop Athenaeum in Amsterdam. She likes to pet cats.
OSSIFICATION ROOM
Work by Julie Orlick and Devin Brown
Curated by Annie Horner
Traversing the far cast net of what’s “out there” to some of its teleological horizons, two Brooklyn filmmakers are shown together using contrasting techniques, subjects, and approaches to build into and through and beyond imagined conscious architecture. What we see may expand and then ossify depending on where we look.
from September 1 – 27, 2018
The Filmmakers
DAS IST KUNST by Julie Orlick
DAS IST KUNST by Julie Orlick (16mm, bw, silent, 2028). Abstraktion of the minds’ eye, screaming shadows within yourself. Starring Bridge Markland of Le Pustra’s Kabarett de Namenlosen. Berlin, Germany
Julie Orlick (b. 1990; los angeles, california) is an american film maker, director, photographer & artist based in brooklyn, new york. she is an instructor at mono no aware and has screened her 16mm work across the US. focusing on in-camera bolex tricks, the absurdity of existence and adhering angalogue techniques.
Under Oleaginous Star by DB Brown
Under Oleaginous Star. The first of 14 murky soliloquies from an emerging primitive mind, whose continuing birth-procedure is an unintended consequence of an ancient long lost technological exercise in attentive perversity known in some circles as “Wei Wu Wei.” (First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is) Beyond the body, beyond procedure or classification, beyond intention, there is a dark, deep, undulating ocean out of which will emerge___
DB Brown is an unskilled laborer and practitioner of meaningless devotion. His films have been featured in his brother’s pit, at schools and hospitals throughout the southern tier, and at the gas pump. Through his work he concerns himself with expathy, subconscious meta-sexual drives, and fateful encounters between a humiliated mankind and the indifference of the divine.
@golfbag98
The Curator
Annie Horner is a curator, filmmaker, and producer whose curatorial efforts in film have manifested in documentary film festivals and experimental screenings along America’s east coast. She is a collaborator at Maylses Cinema in Harlem since 2015 and practices filmmaking focused on short, experimental videos that explore the representation of nature in media and the affect of discreet film & video formats on perception.
RELOCATED
The Films
Sam Cannon is an artist and director based in NYC. Her personal work focuses on the manipulation of time, space, and the female form. Living somewhere between still photography and video, her images explore the way we interact with never-ending moments in the age of the 15 second clip.
Swarm addresses aggressive sexuality outside of the cis-male gaze. It explores power dynamics and violence in those arenas. Imagery in the piece was culled from magazine fashion spreads, advertisements, and my original drawings/watercolors.
Carrie Hawks harnesses the magic of animation to tell stories. The artist works in a variety of medium including drawing, doll-making, and performance. Their work addresses gender, sexuality, and race. They have shown in New York, Atlanta, Kansas City, Toronto, and Tokyo. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University. Their first film, Delilah, won the Best Experimental Award at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival (2012). Their films have screened at BlackStar Film Festival (Philadelphia), CinemAfrica (Stockholm, Sweden), and MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival (New York). black enuf* won the ‘Best Animation’ at Reel Sisters of the Diaspora, and ‘Best Women’s Short Film-Audience Award’ at the 30th Annual Out on Film Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.
https://www.maroonhorizon.com/
Splits Are Parted. A randomly generated spiderweb of tiny virtual bodies, clones of the artist’s 3D scanned body. By moving or simply passing in front of the projection, visitors break and twitch these fragile bodies. These little virtual dolls break while trying to remain intact, and they resonate like shutter glasses whenever an “intruder” appear.
***Documentation of an interactive installation
Martina Menegon (Italy, 1988) is a multimedia artist and lecturer of Virtual Reality and Interactive Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Art University in Linz. She also regularly collaborates with Klaus Obermaier and Stefano D’Alessio, teaching multimedia tools for interactive arts and creating interactive performances and installations. Through multimedia installations that spawn between interactive, virtual and mixed reality art, Martina Menegon uses digital media to re- materialise the body after it has been transferred into a virtual state, creating an intimate and complex assemblage of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its synthetic corporeality.
Martina Menegon lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
http://www.martinamenegon.com/
MAGIC REVEALED
When Time Moves Faster (2016) 6:35 by Anna Vasof
Among other things, Anna Vasof’s working method was influenced by pre-cinematic devices, stemming from her fascination with the movement of photographic images. These only appear animated given our persistence of vision. Vasof cites the zoetrope, a device that filled people of all ages with wonder at fairs of old, as an example of this phenomenon.
Anna Vasof is an architect and media artist. Born in 1985, she studied architecture at the University of Thessaly (2010) in Greece and Transmedia Art (2014) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2004, her videos and short movies have been presented in several festivals, some of them winning distinctions. She’s currently writing a Ph.D. thesis about an animation technical that she develops and a the same time working on designing and building innovative mechanism for producing critical and narrative videos, actions and installations.
The Anamorphosis Trap (2008) 2:35 by B. Shimbe Shim
Drawing on the construction by taping to build an unknown dimension, Stepping on the tiny gap in the illusion of perspective, Summoning the red dummy of what you see.
Shimbe is an award winning filmmaker and media artist. He majored in Experimental Animation at CalArts, and has expanded his artistic domain to various fields of art through film and animation. His works include, “The Wonder Hospital” – an animated film, “Mosquito” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ music album art works and videos, and “Futurama” – TV animation series. His films have shown at festivals around world getting multiple awards from SXSW, LA Film Fest, SIGGRAPH, and Anima Brussels, etc. He’s currently working as a film director and teaching at California State University Long Beach.
Hosted by UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art
322 UNION AVE. WILLIAMSBURG
About the Films:
Peephole Cinema exhibitions showcase contemporary media artists while also evoking the proto- and early cinema experiences of the peep show. This UnionDocs program, Kinetoscopic Records, invites a collision of the old and new, the earliest movies and born-digital works. The ten pieces replicate qualities of the earliest film shows, an incongruous variety of kinetic, flickery, silent pictures in motion, each less than a minute long.
This program’s inspiration is the recent rebirth of one of the first motion pictures ever made, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894 (aka Fred Ott’s Sneeze). Although its copyrighted images appeared in print in 1894, the Sneeze was not seen in motion until reanimated on 16mm film in 1953. However, only now has the entire recording been reproduced. The new Library of Congress version reveals The Sneeze to be nearly twice as long as presumed, with Mr. Ott sneezing twice in one unedited take. This is its premier public run.
The ten movies in five minutes are:
K.-L. Dickson, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze
Evan Meaney, Re_Sneeze
Jodie Mack, All Stars
Joel Schlemowitz, The Invention of the Gramophone
Danielle Ash, Creature of the Gowanus
Tom Whiteside & Anna Kipervaser, Ott Gotcha
Andrea Callard, Something Medical
Bill Brand, Ornithology 4
Mono No Aware, Sneezes
Bill Morrison, Dancing Decay
Images: Mack, Morrison
Three new pieces derive directly from the Sneeze. Evan Meaney takes the new version and digitally explodes its halftone printing. Tom Whiteside (who actually collects celluloid prints of Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and Anna Kipervaser create a 16mm found footage jest, while the Mono No Aware collective made a pilgrimage-homage, traveling to the Edison Historic Site in New Jersey to shoot Sneezes on black-and-white 16mm film inside the Black Maria building.
Two others works, also born on celluloid, reference the era of early cinema. Joel Schlemowitz shot black-and-white film for his Mélièsian féerie about the Kinetoscope’s exact contemporary, the gramophone. Bill Morrison’s uncanny piece of decaying nitrate 35mm film reveals dancers (a frequent Kinetoscope subject) dancing in a pink cobweb of swirling emulsion. (It too came from the Library of Congress, but from its discard bin.)
The remaining pieces deliver a variety of arresting images for the peep show viewing context. Jodie Mack’s cameraless animation stars rapid-fire geometric forms, while fellow animator Danielle Ash creates an ethereal aerial view of an imagined Brooklyn, lit up by lengthy exposures of thousands of pinholes. Bill Brand’s dual-layered duel of abstraction and HD realism pushes the kinetic accelerator even further with a traveling matte that flutters over every frame. The medical imaging technology Andrea Callard uses in her memento mori piece pulls in yet another direction, a reminder that early cinema combined optical toys and scientific devices.
New works by Bradley Eros, Sarah Halpern, Andrew Lampert
curated by Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti (Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn)
Spacetime Singularities is a program of new moving image works made for the occasion of Peephole Cinema by Bradley Eros, Sarah Halpern and Andrew Lampert. The works, hand shot by each artist in the darkness – of a cave, a nightclub and on the streets of NYC in the wee morning hours – collapse sensations and sounds into a single focus viewing experience in which stalactites appear as sonograms, Kenneth Anger conducts a ceremony on the theremin, and liquid nitrogen tanks become ticking time bombs in the city’s rain-slicked streets. – EB & AM
Bradley Eros
Nitrogen Ghost, 2015
digital video, color and b&w, sound, 3 minutes
“A speculative fiction on the mysterious tanks that populate the streets of New York City. A haunted abstraction of metal, steam & luminous objects moving through urban spaces.” – BE
Bradley Eros is a New York-based artist working in various mediums including film & video, collage, performance, contracted and expanded cinema & installation. Eros works have exhibited and screened extensively in the US and abroad including at The Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum’s series “The American Century”, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Andy Warhol Museum, MoMA P.S.1, The New Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Participant Inc., The Kitchen, Performa09, Arsenal (Berlin), Camden Arts Center (London), and The New York, London and Rotterdam Film Festivals. Collaborations include the Alchemical Theater, the band Circle X, Voom HD Lab, and the expanded cinema groups kinoSonik, Arcane Project and currently Optipus. Eros works and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Sarah Halpern, Interior, 2015
16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent, 2 minutes
“An optically printed cave sonogram for hole peeping.” – SH
Sarah Halpern works with 16mm film, collage on paper, 35mm slides, music and performance. Her work is largely focused on cinematic time and the active role of the viewer, and has been shown previously at venues including The Museum of Moving Image, The Kitchen, Participant Inc, Anthology Film Archives, and Microscope Gallery. Halpern holds a B.A. in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College and was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2014. She works and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Andrew Lampert, Prelude In Anger, 2015
Super 8mm transferred to digital, color, silent, 1 minute 50 seconds
“Silent documentation of a loud event that you don’t need to hear in order to feel. Kenneth Anger, filmmaker and author, live on the theremin, May 19 2010.” – AL
Andrew Lampert makes moving images, photographs and live performances that deal with whatever he is thinking about, fascinated by or concerned with around the time of production. He has no single focus and is strategically inconsistent, which may or may not be apparent. Lampert has widely exhibited at institutions and festivals including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Gallery of Ontario, MoMA P.S.1, The Getty Museum, The British Film Institute, The International Rotterdam Film Festival, The Toronto International Film Festival and The New York Film Festival. Musical collaborators have included Chris Corsano, Peter Evans, Okkyung Lee, Alan Licht and C. Spencer Yeh among many others. He is editor of the book THE GEORGE KUCHAR READER (Primary Information, 2014) and co-editor of both volumes of HARRY SMITH COLLECTIONS CATALOGUE RAISONNE (J&L Books, 2015). Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in NYC distributes many of his works. Lampert works and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
May Films from Living Los Sures
The Peephole Cinema integrated in a new public artwork on the facade of UnionDocs. This piece, created in early June, is part of the multi-faceted Living Los Sures project. Part omnibus film, part media archeology, part deep-map and city symphony, the project uses Los Sures, a brilliant work of cinema verite directed by Diego Echeverria in 1984, as a starting point for the investigations of more than sixty artists over the course of five years.
In the early 80s, the Southside neighborhood of Williamsburg Brooklyn (locally known as Los Sures) was one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. In fact, it had been called the worst ghetto in America. Shot in 1984, Diego Echeverria’s film skillfully represents the many challenges this place faced: drugs, gang violence, crime, abandoned real estate, racial tension, single-parent homes, and inadequate local resources. At the same time, the documentary also celebrates the vitality of this largely Puerto Rican and Dominican community, showing the strength of their culture, their creativity, and their determination to overcome a sometimes desperate situation. Beautifully restored just in time for the 30th anniversary of its original premiere at the New York Film Festival, Los Sures is a piece of New York City history we must not forget.
Living Los Sures restores this lost film, remixes local histories, reinvestigates the Southside today, and hopes to reunites a neighborhood around a sustainable future. The new mural on UnionDocs facade is by local artist José Luis Medina and painted by Daniel Colon. It focuses on the life of Cuso Soto, one of the five principle characters from the 1984 documentary. Through a 9 panel comic, Medina in collaboration with UnionDocs, tells the story of Soto’s life and expands beyond the limits of the original film. Beautiful scenes of streetlife in the neighborhood that show Cuso Soto in1984 are on current view in through the Peephole.
Dark Matter: The films of Sarah Christman, Matt Town and Carolyn Lazard.
Curated by Toby Lee.
Dark Matter
The cosmological concept of dark matter has served as a useful metaphor to describe the hidden structures underlying a variety of social worlds. As Gregory Sholette writes about the art world, its “dark matter” functions as an invisible twin to the visible world — a largely unseen body of people, places and practices that exists in parallel to, and even conditions, the visible world, but can only be sensed or known through its effects. Here, we apply the concept of dark matter to our experience of the city, its built environment, its social structures. In these films, we glimpse this invisible city.
Sarah Christman Outside Over There
Shot in Jamaica Bay, Queens. At the shore, the city comes to an end. Or, from another point of view, this is where it begins. Figure, or ground? The water looks back.
Still from Sarah Christman’s Film Outside Over There (2 min, 16mm to HD, 2009/2014)
Matt Town Protest
Housing protest in Bushwick, Brooklyn. As the “development” of a neighborhood marches on, so do its residents.
Still from Matt Town’s film Protest
Carolyn Lazard The Blues
The Blues chews over the intermittent visibility and exceptionalism of one of the most entrenched New York City infrastructures: the police.
