DREAMLANDS: EXPANDED
Monday December 19, 6pm
SLIDES & MIRRORS PLAYS
PART I: Sliding Memories, 6PM
Gill Arno, Kenneth Zoran Curwood, Sarah Halpern, Alexia Welch
PART II: Mirror Mirror, 8PM
Rachael Guma, Simon Liu, Karolina Raczynski, Raha Raissnia
From: Simon Liu, “Cluster Click City Sundays”, 2016 – Courtesy of the artist
“Slides & Mirrors Plays” is a double program of performances by new generations of artists working with expanded cinema practices. Part I features works involving in whole or in part photographic and handmade slides, in which memory as approached and reinterpreted through alternative uses of the projection apparatuses is revealed as an overriding theme. Part II considers the duplicable quality of the image as achieved through printing processes, multiplication of screens, screen mirroring, and others including a remote interaction with mirrors via Skype.
Full Program
General admission $20
Students & Members $15
Part I or Part II only
General admission $15
Students & Members $10
PART I: SLIDING MEMORIES, 6PM
Gill Arno
Apriti Cielo (Compound Recall), 2016
video, 8mm film and slide projector arrays, approx. 20 minutes
Apriti Cielo (Compound Recall) is hybrid work engaging memory from both an emotional and sensory standpoint and the latest in a series of performances as part of the artist’s intermedia project mpld, in which he plays sequences of modified found slides while processing and amplifying the projectors’ electromechanical sounds. The work features entirely new materials and incorporates video for the fist time.
Alexia Welch
REMEMBERING, THREE WAYS, 2014
handmade 35mm slides, voice, 13 minutes
A personal work involving handmade 35mm slides by the artist accompanied by her voice.
“This work aims to relay a memory.” – Alexia Welch
Sarah Halpern
Recapitulation, 2016
film strip projector, slide projector, textiles, voice & fetal doppler, approx. 20 minutes
“This performance is about domesticity and the playful exploration of everyday things. Objects in the home are used for their intended purpose. Over time this usage begins to feel personally relevant. Much later these objects may serve as documentation, as recordings of the period during which they were used. ‘Recapitulation’ utilizes the projector as a functional object and as an idea. The projector becomes a reference to both memory and invention.” – SH
Kenneth Zoran Curwood
Dissolution 5, 12/19/16
single 35mm slide projection, water, bleach, duration variable
Curwood’s single slide projection is a stunningly beautiful complete obliteration of the image as it is bleached before the audience’s eyes.
PART II: MIRROR, MIRROR, 8PM
Karolina Raczynski
Signals, 2013
Skype video, projector and handheld mirrors, duration variable
“Signals is an interactive performance using mirror signaling and live video feed (Skype) requiring audience participation. It has previously been set up as either two audiences, or one audience and the artist, located in two separate projection rooms or in different countries. A computer and projector are positioned at the front of each room. The projectors then face the audience and their light source enables the act of signaling.” – KR
Simon Liu
Cluster Click City Sundays, 2017
16mm triple projection, approx. 20 minutes
Live Score by Warren Ng
“A travelogue film of sorts in which various cities melt into prismatic tapestry. A lack of familiarity with these surroundings breed a distant and fleeting view of space – repeatedly navigating from light to dark; alleyway to highway. This spastic dance with the Bolex turns the heads of onlookers and leaves my neck sore. An unwavering choreography between projectors collapses months to minutes; swiping between continents.” – SL
Rachael Guma
REDNOWWONDER, 2016
Super 8mm film projection, glass sheet, approx. 10 minutes
Live sound by Gabriel Guma
“A composition in 4 movements for 2 Super 8mm projectors, mirrors and glass organ. REDNOWWONDER is a play between mirrors, reflections, and the elements that govern us all. Synthetic treatments and lumia by Gabriel Guma.” – RG
Raha Raissnia
Nadir 2, 2016
Performance for 2 projectors, super 8mm film & 35mm slides, hand painted double screens, 15 minutes
Live sound by Panagiotis Mavridis with homemade instruments
“The slides are made with photographic images I took in studio that I layered and painted by hand. The super 8mm film is of various segments of my paintings made on canvas. The basic structural elements: light, camera, film and screen were manipulated in making the work and will be further manipulated in the live presentation of it. This work is not about anything particular. I made it through minimal means in a visceral fashion. It’s of moment in between.” – RR
Artists’ Bios
Gill Arno was born in 1968 in Italy, where he studied art, typography and graphic design before moving to New York in 1997. Arno’s initial engagement with book and record cover design expanded to include the construction of light environments as part of experimental music events and eventually developed into his own audio-visual live performance project mpld. The scope of his current work straddles conventional boundaries between image and music, materiality and abstraction, noise and consonance, stasis and transition, subjective account and common narrative. In 2016 Arno completed an MFA (music/sound) at Bard College.
Kenneth Zoran Curwood (b. 1971 NYC) is a Brooklyn based artist working in film, animation and sculpture. He received a BA from School of Visual Arts in 1995. His 16mm films combine traditional animation practices with many bygone special effects techniques. His sculptural work plays with it’s own role in space and culture. He has led workshops at Columbia University and Camera Club New York.
Gabriel Guma is a visual artist and dedicated “sound mangler”. Originally from Argentina, he’s been living and working in New York for the past 20 years. A fascination with electronic music took hold via his dad’s vast library when he was a wee lad, which lead to a long-standing obsession with synthesizers and vinyl record collecting. Although Gabriel prefers the controlled austerity of the home studio than to be under the spotlight, he has performed live soundtracks for experimental short films with his wife Rachael at Picture Show Gallery and Anthology Film Archives. As a founding member of the sound collective Underworld Oscillator Corporation, Gabriel plays synthesizers and has performed at Theater 80, Secret Project Robot, and most recently at Morbid Anatomy Museum for a live soundtrack to The Phantom of the Opera. He is currently working on a solo album of dissonant, low-fi instrumental miniatures and on more soundtrack pieces with the Underworld Oscillator Corporation.
Rachael Guma is a filmmaker and sound artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Through her experiments with film, sound, and projection performance, Rachael strives to create an engaging live viewing experience that embraces the idiosyncratic qualities of technology, while constantly striving for a hand-crafted approach. Her films have screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque, RX Gallery, Mono No Aware, Northern Flickers, UnionDocs, AXWFF, Black Maria, Echo Park Film Center and Microscope Gallery. As a member of Optipus Film Collective, she has performed live foley at the Kitchen, Participant Gallery, Roulette, and the Museum of Art and Design (MAD). Rachael plays theremin for Underworld Oscillator Corporation, a sound collective. She is also a founding member of the liquid light projection group, A Clockface Orange.
Sarah Halpern works with film, paper, sound and performance. She has exhibited her artwork and performed at venues including Anthology Film Archives, The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia, Microscope Gallery, and NYFF’s Views from the Avant Garde among others. She has collaborated extensively with electronic musician and composer Matt Wellins as well as expanded cinema performance group Optipus. Halpern was born in Washington DC and lives and works in Queens, New York. She received a BA in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College. She received a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship in 2014.
Simon Liu lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Hong Kong and raised in both Hong Kong and Stoke-On-Trent, England, he moved to New York in 2006 and received a degree in Film Production from New York University. His work has been exhibited and distributed at festivals and institutions internationally including the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2016 & 2017, CROSSROADS, EXiS, Microscope Gallery, Paris Festival of Different & Experimental Cinemas, Mono No Aware IX & X, the British Film Institute and the Rio De Janeiro International Film Festival. Simon is a member of the artist-run Negativland Motion Pictute Lab, where he prints, processes and completes his films on 16mm. He has given lectures and performed as a visiting artist at universities such as the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Beijing Film Academy and the New School.
Panagiotis Mavridis (b. 1980, Athens, Greece ) works with sculpture, drawing and sound. In recent years he has been involved in designing and making musical instruments that combine electronic and acoustic principles.
Warren Ng is a San Francisco-born, Brooklyn-based experimental guitarist who draws from minimalism, drone, free-form improvisation, and noise. He has performed and recorded solo and collaboratively under the names This Invitation, Somnambulists, and A Blanket of Snow. His releases include: This Invitation’s “The Skin of Light” (2004) and “Sunless / Ellipses, Lapses, and Collapses” (2010); and Somnambulists’ “At Day Break the First Greyness to Emerge” (2010) and “The Invisible Score” (2010). Since late 2015, he has contributed sound in recordings and in performance (both in solo and as a duo with musician Ben Hozie) for a number of Simon Liu’s films and multiple projection works, including live performances at Mono No Aware IX (2015) & X (2016), the San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Festival (2016), Sight Unseen in Baltimore (2016), and Kilroy Metal Ceiling, Brooklyn (2016).
Karolina Raczynski (b. 1986, lives and works in London) is a founder member of collective-iz, a London based filmmakers collective. Her practice focuses on space, community & technology. Influenced by Expanded Cinema, her work attempts to move beyond the single screen setup and instead emphasises the perception of the projection as an event or a physical experience, often using video, film, Internet, public intervention, sound and performance. She is interested in how the audience receive and respond to these events. She has participated in screenings and events around the UK, Germany and Poland.
Raha Raissnia (b.1968 Tehran, Iran) creates complex works which combine painting, film and drawing. Much of her work is focused on exploring the intersection of these different mediums and how each informs the other in terms of their materiality and their respective processes of making. Raissnia’s projection performances have been held at MoMA, New York; Issue Project Room, New York; Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, and Arnolfini – Center for Contemporary Arts, Bristol, UK, among others. In 2015, her work was included in “All the World’s Futures” curated by Okwui Enwezor for The Venice Biennale 56th International Art Exhibition. Recent solo shows were held at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid; Galerie Xippas, Paris, and the Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art, Isfahan, Iran. Raissnia lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York.
Alexia Welch lives and works in Los Angeles where she also makes videos and texts. These projects often take up issues surrounding embodiment, dykeish sexuality and community standards. She graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College in 2013.
About “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016”
This fall, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016, a landmark exhibition that focuses on the ways in which technology has created new forms of immersive experience using the moving image. Artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to create new readings of space, optical form, and time. The exhibition will fill the Museum’s 18,000-square-foot Neil Bluhm Family Galleries on the fifth floor, as well as the adjacent Kaufman Gallery, and will include a substantial film program in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater, and a series of expanded cinema events organized by Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in collaboration with the Whitney. Organized by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.
From: Sarah Halpern, “Recapitulation”, 2016 – Courtesy of the artist
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Lead Underwriting Support Provided by the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation.
Generous Support provided by J.J. Kasper, Paul Jost, and Natasha Reatig.
This presentation is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council of the Arts’ Electronic Media & Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.
Microscope Gallery Event Series is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
Additional Support provided by Knockdown Center and Negativland.
Sponsored by Colorlab and The Bodega. Official Media Partner: The Brooklyn Rail.
