Monday March 11, 7PM
QUIET DISRUPTIONS
Videos by Amanda Belantara, Maya Ciarrocchi, Angela Ferraiolo, and Charmaine Ortiz
several artists will be in attendance
admission $6
Still from Overburden by Maya Ciarrocchi (2012) © Image courtesy of the artist
Microscope presents “Quiet Disruptions”, a program of short videos by Amanda Belantara, Maya Ciarrocchi, Angela Ferraiolo, and Charmaine Ortiz, with works ranging from a visual “documentary” of mountain top mining in Appalachia and the aftermath of a massive snow storm in Japan to those dealing with the image altering effects of camera motion and frame rate or changes in pixel colors triggered by generative video. The works – all shot in natural settings – are connected by their authors’ attention to seeing and recording the subtleties in moments of disruption in the world around them. This is the first time we have presented works by any of the artists at the gallery.
PROGRAM
Overburden
by Maya Ciarrocchi
HD video, color, sound, 20 minutes, 2012
Every year, forty-three million tons of coal are taken from West Virginia through Mountaintop Removal mining. Overburden is comprised of footage of active and abandoned mines juxtaposed with video portraits of activists, local residents, and miners in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia. The video images reflect the conflicting realities of life there: the lushness of the landscape and the desolation of the mines. The work is documentary in style, but contains no commentary or interviews.
“My goal with this work is to create a durational work of open narrative that presents no single agenda other than exposing the complex issues surrounding energy production in the United States.” –MC
TYB Gesture
by Charmaine Ortiz
video, color, sound, 61 seconds, 2010
The work explores the variety of lines present within a natural environment. It also seeks to bring an associative awareness of the sound of drawing lines to the perception of the landscape. The video was made as part of Ortiz’s MFA painting thesis exhibit at Savannah College of Art and Design.
The Courtyard XI
by Angela Ferraiolo
HD video, color, 8 minutes 30 seconds, 2012
Courtyard is an experiment in generative video. The slow degradation of the image was accomplished by running one continuous take of hi-def video through a computer algorithm which reads the pixels of the video frames as color data, then resorts their composition on a pixel by pixel basis. Color values are then reassigned frame-by-frame according to their original value, plus or minus some random disruption. The result is a constant, recognizable image which slowly breaks down into pure noise.
Index of the Wagon Wheel
by Charmaine Ortiz
b&w video, silent, 2 minutes 49 seconds, 2011
Index of the Wagon Wheel references an optical illusion known as the wagon wheel effect. In the video, the indexical signifier for the wagon wheel is used to create a drawing. The indexical mark moves through time and space and formally functions as a hard and soft edge, which is drawn, blurred, erased and redrawn. Pattern, rhythm, edge, standstill image despite rapid movement, inanimate line animated through body movement, process.
Sonotoki
by Amanda Belantara
b&w video, sound, 18 minutes, 2012
The ephemeral yet recurring movements of human life and nature. Originally created for Re-Modernologio “Landscape of Traces” exhibition at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center in Japan.
Still from The Courtyard XI by Angela Ferraiolo (2012) © Image courtesy of the artist
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Amanda Belantara is an audio-visual artist with a background in visual anthropology and ethnographic film. Her work has been shown in film festivals around the world and featured in exhibitions at SOMArts, San Francisco, Aomori Contemporary Arts Centre and The John Rylands Library Manchester. She is also co-founder of the international artist collective, Kinokophone.
Maya Ciarrocchi’s video installations present nuanced views of social, political and cultural issues that are often part of common discourse yet distant from our actual experience. Her work has been exhibited in New York at chashama; The Chocolate Factory; New York Live Arts; Sasha Wolf Gallery; and at Artisphere (VA); Hammer Museum (CA); the Borderlines Film Festival (UK); and the Moving Pictures Festival (CAN). Additionally she has created video and projections for performance with Merce Cunningham, Ping Chong, Bebe Miller, and Donna Uchizono among others. Ciarrocchi has completed residencies from the Kala Art Institute (CA) the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NY) and the Ucross Foundation (WY). She is the recipient of a Bessie (New York Dance & Theater Award) and a Jeff Award (Chicago Theater Awards) for video design in performance and has received project grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. www.mayaciarrocchi.com
Angela Ferraiolo is a writer and filmmaker who is exploring how computational and procedural practices might affect the traditions of media and art cinema. Her video work has been screened at the New York Film Festival, Collectìf Jeune Cinema Paris, the Australian Experimental Film Festival, Digital Fringe Melbourne, Die Gesellschafter Filmwettbewerb Germany, Granoff Center for the Arts Providence, TechFest Bombay, and the International Conference of Generative Art Rome. Her new projects include further experiments in generative video and playable media. She is currently a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College.
Charmaine Ortiz is a visual artist based out of Carolina Beach, North Carolina. Her work is rooted in her love for history and by her need to connect with her father, who as a civil engineer drew with graphite until the digital era. She received the Combined Honors Fellowship earning her MFA in Painting and an MA in Art History from Savannah College of Art and Design. She has earned other merit awards including SCAD’s Thesis Encore Award as well as grants and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Contemporary Art Center at Woodside, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally and has also presented her art historical research at Universities across North Carolina and Georgia. Her work was most recently accepted into the Drawing Center (NY) Viewing Program.
Still from Sonotoki by Amanda Belantara (2012) © Image courtesy of the artist
Still from Index of the Wagon Wheel by Charmaine Ortiz (2011) © Image courtesy of the artist
