PAST SHOWS
Hofreh
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.
Stop-Motion Animations made by students from
Art Club at Achievement First Bushwick Middle School
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.
GIF FLICKS
vivid frames for winding brains
April 12, 2019 – July 28, 2019
Work by Thu Tran, Rebekka Dunlap, Jaimie Warren and Abbey Luck
Curated by Dani Newman for GIPHY Arts
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
Punching Back Tears by Abbey Luck, 2018
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.
BAD TRANSLATION
very short films for a distracted world
from September 28, 2018 – April 11, 2019
work by albert omoss, aleia, beeple, cool3world, kelsey bennett, sholim, zolloc
Curated by Sam Cannon
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
squint for a silver
Poster by Bailey Steele
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
Filmmakers who re-materialize the body
Work by Sam Cannon, Carrie Hawks and Martina Menegon
Curated by Laurie O’Brien
from July 27 – August 31, 2018
The Films
The three short films feature work that explores digital representations of the female and genderqueer body.
The filmmakers’ hybrid selves are depicted through transfiguration, repetition, and the relocation of body parts.
All three films transcend a singular and unified self in very different ways. They explore a pervasive paradigm shift our era that questions the limits of a cohesive and fixed identity and human body.
By viewing these films through a peephole in a public space, we are confronted directly with tensions around the gaze, public and private, authorized viewing, intrusion and voyeurism.
The Filmmakers
Legs On Pedastal by Sam Cannon
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 by Carrie Hawks
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 by Martina Menegon
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
Visual Illusions and the Persistence of Vision
Work by Anna Vasof and B. Shimbe Shim
Curated by Laurie O’Brien
from June 1, 2018 – July 26, 2018
This series of films question our sense of time and orientation in space. In a world that keeps demanding more speed and with the prevalence of apps & digital filters to make video illusions and effects, these filmmakers transparently slow down time and disorient our normal sense of space with the hand-made. Watching the process inside of their films add a sense of wonder and delight to the eye of the viewer.
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.
Kintoscopic Records at UnionDocs, 2016
contemporary short films and videos inspired by the earliest cinema
Program by Dan Streible (NYU / Orphan Film Symposium)
September 18th – December 31st
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.
Spacetime Singularities
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.
