Cue Mark
Screening organized by Jenna Westra
Thursday September 28th
Doors 7:00pm | Films 7:30pm
Program:
De Luce 1: Vegetare by Janis Crystal Lipzin (2009), Super 8mm transfer to HD video (color, sound), 4:58 mins
De Luce 2: Architectura by Janis Crystal Lipzin (2013), Super 8mm transfer to HD video (color, sound), 8:34 mins
La Scala by Aglaia Konrad (2016), 16mm transfer to HD video (color), split-screen, 12:24 mins
Static Movement Sundown by Jenna Westra (2017), 16mm transfer to HD video (color), 8:11 mins
Bridge Piece by Lucy Kerr (2017), Super 8mm transfer to HD video (color), 3:09 mins
Viscera by Laura Bartczak (2016), Super 8mm transfer to HD video (color), split-screen, 3:42 mins
The Forest is Offended by Stephanie Barber (2017), 16mm transfer to HD video (b&w/color, sound), 2:25 mins
3 Peonies by Stephanie Barber (2017), 16mm transfer to HD video (color, sound), 3:13 mins
Mirroring by Ellie Parker (2016), 16mm transfer to HD video (color), 2:55 mins
Cue Mark brings together nine films by seven artists who share an affinity for the poetics of movement and a reverence for analogue cinema. These artists use their cameras to record and bring to light both object and performance and make permanent via photochemical processes.
Janis Crystal Lipzin considers film to be a material located in the painterly realm, and engages with the material's sensory and optical qualities. Through hand processing her film and manipulating the emulsion, she reveals an expansion of the industrial Kodak color palette, alluding to the natural world where possible color expressions are enhanced. Her subjects in De Luce 1 & 2 include plant life and architecture, natural and built environments that dance with their recordings in modernist color field tableaus.
The work of Aglaia Konrad is similarly concerned with the built environment, her film La Scala is a spatio-temporal continuum of the Brutalist residential building designed by Vittoriano Vigano for Andre Bloc (1956-1958, La Garda, San Felice, Italy). The camera pans in a soothing slow motion and traverses interior and exterior space fluidly, with reflections in the glass facade reading as double exposures. Her material concerns are in the apparatus; the optical system, aiming and reframing. She proposes the potential for film to embody the experience of architecture as sculpture.
Where the moving camera animates the static sculptural architecture in La Scala, Jenna Westra's portrait of a dancer titled Static Movement Sundown insists on slowing down movement of the human body and allowing external forces of the camera, wind, and sun to intervene. Lucy Kerr's Bridge Piece and Laura Bartczak's Viscera are similarly grounded in choreography and performance, though the technical possibilities of stop motion and advanced editing effects pay homage to the "magic" of filmmaking. While Bridge Piece follows a dancer's sequence of lethargic efforts to stand up right, Bartzak's imagery offers frantic, strobe-like portraits of desert landscapes contrasted by split screen close-ups of a bouncing torso.
Stephanie Barber's work 3 Peonies traverses ground that reads both violent and nurturing, where cut pink flowers are progressively covered with blue painters tape on a blood red ground. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such "natural" beauty. Mirroring by Ellie Parker reflects on the camera's ability to act as a Barthesian mirror to the past.
Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Her videos are concerned with the content, musicality and experiential qualities of language and her language is concerned with the emotional impact of moments and ideas. Each ferry viewers through philosophical inquiry with the unexpected oars of empathy, play, story and humor. Barber's films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals.
Laura Bartczak is a movement and film artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her analog film and photography explores personal narrative revealed through body language and gesture. Her choreography and film work has been presented by Radar at Anthology Film Archives, AUNTS, Movement Research at Judson Church, CATCH, Mono No Aware, The Domestic Performance Agency, TAB, Hypnocraft, Gina Gibney Dance Center, DCTV, Dance Film Association, Otion Front Studio, and CPR among others.
Lucy Kerr is an Los Angeles-based choreographer and video, film, performance, and installation artist. She is an MFA Candidate in Film/Video and Integrated Media at California Institute of the Arts on the Lillian Disney Scholarship. Kerr received a B.A in Philosophy and a B.A. in Dance from The University of Texas at Austin and was the grand prize winner of the 2014 Co-op / George H. Mitchell Awards for Academic Excellence for her undergraduate thesis. She has received commissions from Mono No Aware and the Center for Performance Research and was selected as a 2014-2017 Fellow at LEIMAY. Her projects have been presented with The Brooklyn Museum, Anthology Film Archives, The Chimney NYC, Cucalorus Film Festival, Dance Films Association, Mono No Aware, The Center for Performance Research, Co-Lab Projects, The Aurora Picture Show, Triskelion Arts, IDIO Gallery, LEIMAY, and The MATCH Houston, among others.
Aglaia Konrad is an Austrian artist living and working in Brussels where she teaches at the LUCA School of Arts, Sint-Lukas. She has been interested in urban space in a broad range of perspectives since the early 90's. Working in various media like film, video, photography and installations, she has presented at Documenta X, Cities on the Move, Orbis Terrarum, ways of Worldmaking and Manifesta 9. Since 2007 she has undertaken several 16mm film projects, Sculpture House, Concrete & Samples I, II, III in which the notion of sculptural architecture has been explored, and shown in international screenings and festivals. Konrad's recent solo exhibitions include Aglaia Konrad: From A to K, Museum M in Leuven, Belgium (2016); Apparent Positions, Aglaia Konrad - Concrete & Samples, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, U.K. (2012); Das Haus, Netwerk, Aalst, Belgium and Fotohof Salzburg, Austria (2014); Desert Cities, Vervey, Switzerland (2013); Luminair City, Lisbon, Portugal (2017).
Janis Crystal Lipzin is based in rural Sonoma County, California, where she has been making art in virtually every form of reproducible media for nearly forty years and influenced generations of students at the San Francisco Art Institute where she taught for three decades. Her installations, video sculpture, photography, films, audio, and media performance works have confronted an array of subjects such as pyromania, prehistoric murder, pesticide abuse, reproductive rights, and mortality. Her work has been recognized by exhibits and screenings at hundreds of international venues including the recent Dreamlands show at the Whitney Museum, the Film Society at Lincoln Center, the New Museum, the 2013 Venice Biennale, Pompidou Museum, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, San Francisco International Film Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival, and by 3 Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ellie Parker is a New York City based artist originally from Los Angeles. She is a writer of screenplays and poetry and began her journey as a filmmaker creating personal, experimental portraits on analogue film. Ellie discovered her passion for the moving image in high school while taking 16mm film courses at the Echo Park Film Center where she later taught for two years. She not only fell in love with the art of film, but fell in love with teaching, with sharing ideas and opening pathways for learning and creation. Ellie is interested in pushing the formal and conceptual boundaries of documentary, narrative and experimental film in order to capture the truth and essence of her subjects. She is currently in her thesis year at SVA and teaches 16mm film classes at Mono No Aware, a non-profit cinema arts organization. Ellie is devoted to forming communities with those that share in this love for cinematic storytelling.
Jenna Westra received her MFA from Hunter College (2015) and BA from California State University, Northridge (2010). Her photographic works have been exhibited widely, most recently in New York at Thomas Hunter Projects, Hercules Gallery, Silver Projects and Underdonk, in Los Angeles at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and in Boston at The Institute for Contemporary Art and Gallery Kayafas. Her work has been published or reviewed in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Camera Austria, Nicotine Magazine, Papersafe, Bomb Magazine, and Hunted, a series of booklets produced by the Artists' Institute. Jenna is currently artist-in-residence at Hercules Art Studio Program in New York City and will present solo exhibitions at Lubov gallery in New York and Four Seasons Berlin in 2018.