Program 2
curated by Trisha Low
Friday, March 15, 2019 @ 9pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 60 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale - tickets at the door
Festival passes available for purchase here
frame, ways, inflections
Kioto Aoki
2018 | 3 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | silent
A piece about the movement of bodies through space for the site-specific installation at 6018|North for the show "Living Architecture," inspired by architect Bernard Cache's notion of inflections. The film activates two existing works at the gallery: "Duchamp Door" in the basement and Vlatka Horvat's "Door to Door" on the second floor and projected in the closet behind a rearranged version of Horvat's piece.
-KA
Song for Rent, after Jack Smith
Malic Amalya
2018 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
With Kate Smith singing God Bless America looped in the background, experimental filmmaker Jack Smith starred as Rose Courtyard—a drag character based on Rose Kennedy—in his 1969 film, Song for Rent. In this adaptation, Barbarella Bush joins Rose in a campy exploration of US nationalism, queer assimilation, and denunciation.
-MA
Futility
Greta Snider
1989 | 9 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
Futility's narrative is told in two disarmingly honest and personal voice-overs, with images reprinted from found and archival footage. The first section is a woman's story about a pregnancy and subsequent difficulties in scheduling an abortion. The second is a moribund love letter read by the same narrator. The images are never an illustration of the voice-over, nor do they constitute a narrative of their own, but blow in and out randomly, constituting a kind of peripheral vision.
-GS
Senses of Time
Wenhua Shi
2018 | 5 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Senses of Time depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work reflects on time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins.
-WS
Mujer
Sofia Canales
2012 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm | b&w | sound
Three Latina women of different generations take pleasure in helping each other bathe, dress up, and cook a meal for themselves. Mujer flows like a dream, guided by the small mutual generosities of domestic life. It is less of an observational analysis and more of an up-close intimate experience.
-SC
Between Relating and Use
Nazlı Dinçel
2018 | 9 minutes | Argentina/USA | 16mm | color | sound
"Exhibitions, whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits for those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject. The first order of business is therefore to examine critically the conventions guiding ethnographic display..."*
Borrowing words from Laura Mark's "Transnational Object" and DW Winnicott's "Transitional Object", this film is an attempt to ethically make work in a foreign land. Transitioning from assuming the position of an ethnographer, we turn and explore inwards- on how we use our lovers.
*Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998
-ND
Square Dance, Los Angeles County, California, 2013
Sílvia das Fadas
2013 | 9 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
"The people are what is not there yet, never in the right place, never ascribable to the place and time where anxieties and dreams await."
-Jacques Rancière
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (By Kelly Gabron)
Cauleen Smith
1995 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
"Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (By Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of 'reality' than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabricates a personal history of her emergence as an artist from white-male-dominated American history (and American film history). Smith collages images and bits of text from a scrapbook by 'Kelly Gabron' that had been completed before the film was begun, and provides female narration by 'Kelly Gabron' that, slowly but surely, makes itself felt over the male narration about Kelly Gabron (Chris Brown is the male voice). The film's barrage of image, text and voice is repeated twice, and is followed by a coda. That most viewers see the second presentation of the imagery differently from the original presentation demonstrates one problem with trusting any media representation."
-Scott MacDonald
What is beyond the Hellraiser?
Guillaume Vallée
2017 | 3 minutes | France/Canada | super 8 | color | sound
- The journey is up to you -
-GV
Kioto Aoki is a visual artist whose practice includes photography, film, books and installations to engage the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process. Using the nuances of time, space, form, light and motion, her work explores different modes of perception as it relates to the space between the still and the moving image; as well as the human body within the device of photographic frame.
She has exhibited and screened in Chicago, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Japan. Her work is held in Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library. Kioto received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a HATCH Projects artist-in-resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Malic Amalya is queercore filmmaker working in 16mm and video. He lives in Oakland and teaches at the California College of the Arts and City College of San Francisco.
Greta Snider is an experimental filmmaker. Her earlier work on 16mm includes a collection of audio and visual experiences that combines photography, found footage, and her own experiences of the San Francisco punk scene in the early 1990s. Her work includes experiments with simultaneous soundtracks (Blood Story, 1990), engaging personal accounts of a scraped-together journey with friends (Portland, 1996), and an audio travelogue of the San Francisco punk scene.
Greta's more recent work includes, in collaboration with Johunna Grayson, a series of slide show projections comprised of hand-processed photographs and stereoscopic images. The series is described as an update on the "campy Viewmaster format," riffing on the concept of the travelogue to present the unseen and underground aspects. Subjects range from forgotten aspects of the everyday ("old man bars," flowers, parts of the body) to the extreme (a Viewmaster series of atomic test blasts). Snider's films explore the importance of small memories, retrieving pieces of ephemera from the underground and re-presenting them on screen.
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.
Sofia Canales is a filmmaker and artist born and based in Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Film/Video and an MFA in Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work lovingly explores familial narratives and images through wide eyes and open ears. Her films have shown at Slamdance Film Festival, Morelia International Film Festival, and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.
Nazlı Dinçel’s hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Her use of text as image, language and sound imitates the failure of memory and her own displacement within a western society.
Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United Sates at age 17. Dinçel resides in Milwaukee, WI where she is currently building an artist run film laboratory. She obtained her MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Her works have been exhibited in numerous venues around the world including MoMA, IFFR, NYFF, BAFICI, EIFF and HKIFF. She recently won the Helen Hill Award at the 2018 Orphan Film Symposium, the Eileen Maitland Award at the 2018 AAFF, Jury Awards at 2018 ICdocs and MUFF for Between Relating and Use (2018).
In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with her work in micro-cinemas, artist run laboratories and alternative screening spaces in order to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions.
Sílvia das Fadas (née Sílvia Salgueiro) is a filmmaker, a researcher, a teacher, a wanderer.
Born in Portugal in 1983, she studied cinema and aesthetics, committing herself to the material learning of film at ANIM (The Portuguese Moving Image Archive) and the Portuguese Cinematheque in Lisbon. Driven by a militant nostalgia, she moved to Los Angeles where she continued to craft her personal films in 16mm, at the California Institute of the Arts. She worked as a Visual History Researcher for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and collaborated with Los Angeles Filmforum until her visa expired and she moved to Vienna in search of a lively film culture. There she worked as a film projectionist for the Austrian Film Museum, while teaching cinema at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she is currently a participant in the PhD in Practice program.
She is the recipient of a Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/ FLAD Scholarship, a CalArts School of Film/Video Scholarship, an Akademie Schloss Solitude Cooperation Fellowship with Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, and a Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia Doctoral Fellowship. Her films have been shown at numerous festivals, cinematheques and minor cinemas.
She is interested in the politics intrinsic to cinematic practices and in cinema as a way of being together in restlessness and brokenness.
Cauleen Smith (born Riverside, California, 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Studio Museum of Harlem, Houston Contemporary Art Museum; Yerba Buena Center for Art, and the New Museum, New York, D21 Leipzig and Decad, Berlin. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Threewalls, Chicago. She shows her drawings and 2D work with Corbett vs. Dempsey. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco Sate University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is based in the great city of Chicago and serves as faculty for the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program.
Experimental filmmaker, video artist and independant curator, Guillaume Vallée graduated from Concordia University with a Major in Film Animation and MFA in Studio Arts - Film Production option. He's interested in alternative forms of moving images in analogue forms as a way of considering the direct interaction between different mediums. His work is an exploration of materiality within the creative process. In attempts of creating a more complex relationship with his subject matter, Vallée makes use of cross-medium forms that range from camera-less techniques to optical effects, glitch, video feedback, resulting in expended & hybrid pieces.
Vallée is questionning the notions of recycling & reappropriation, treating all material as found footage within a collaborative practice, in film, video & performance. His audiovisual performances have been shown in various festivals in Canada, USA and France (MUTEK, O.F.N.I., FICFA, Les Percéides, WUFF (...)) and his experimental films and videos, distributed by Vidéographe and Winnipeg Film Group, have been screened internationnaly. His short film, Le bulbe tragique, won the ''Best Canadian Work'' at WNDX (Festival of Moving Image) in 2016. He's also the co-founder & programmer of Ibrida*Pluri Festival, along with Sonya Stefan & Samuel Bonony.
Guillaume Vallée's completing a PhD in Études et Pratiques des Arts at UQAM, under the direction of Louis Jacob & Mario Côté. His Research-Creation thesis is about the notions of DIY apparatus, scene and the artist as bricoleur, around the practices of experimental cinema.