Archive
2019-2020
UNCOMMON SIGHTS II
Stacey Steers & Charlotte Pryce
Stacey Steers
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
Charlotte Pryce
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.
Stacey Steers
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.
2018-2019
UNCOMMON SIGHTS
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.
2016-17
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.
2015-16
Single Vision
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.
