Monday October 17, 7:30pm
“Maps, Monuments, and Meditations”
works by Lana Z Caplan, Sasha Waters Freyer, Jerimiah Jones, Annie Rose Malamet, Jung Hee Mun, Sarada Rauch, Josh Sender, Katya Yakubov
Q&A w/ New York area artists following the screening
Still from “Monument Feed” (Josh Sender, 2014) – courtesy of the artist
Microscope is very pleased to present a group screening of new and recent works by emerging and more established artists who have not previously shown at the gallery, including those who have come to our attention through our summer open call.
Together the works in the program, which range from 15 seconds to 15 minutes, take on major issues of our times such as border control, power and privilege, sex work, and our conflicted relationship with technology, often incorporating personal experience, literature and poetry, and an appreciation for the absurd.
Featuring works by Lana Z Caplan, Sasha Waters Freyer, Jerimiah Jones, Annie Rose Malamet, Jung Hee Mun, Sarada Rauch, Josh Sender, Katya Yakubov.
General admission $7
Members & Students w/ ID $5
Become a Member HERE
PROGRAM:
(Running time: approx. 50 minutes)
“Maelstroms”
Lana Z Caplan, HD video, 7 minutes 40 seconds, 2015
Using animation, heat sensitive camera footage from US border patrol screens, military bombing drone monitors, and other collected footage, Maelstroms is a reflection on the dehumanizing use of image technology in current practice. Sound by Steerage, courtesy of caduc records.
“A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965”
Sasha Waters Freyer, HD video, 6 minutes 45 seconds, 2015
A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965 meditates upon the violent struggle for independence in southeast Asia and butterfly metamorphosis. Framed by excerpts from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips,” the film reminds us that comfort is a privilege and denial of the suffering of others is not an option. With a live 1965 performance of Bartok’s Solo for Violin 3. Available as a single screen or dual-channel installation.
“The Information”
Jeremiah Jones, HD video, 15 minutes, 2013
The Information’ is an experimental documentary composed entirely of found youtube footage of Wal-Mart Parking lots in North Dakata shot by or about migrant workers in North Dakota. These young men tell stories and give advice from a perspective rooted in a culture founded on situations which echo those of the Grapes of Wrath and the myths of the American west. This story echoes sentiments and themes from my other works, We Are Going to be Poor Forever, and A Natural History of the Subjects of Late Capitalism. All of which stem from my own experience. The story of these workers mirrors some of my own experiences living in a 72 dodge, as well as the feelings of uncertainty that most of us feel as we examine our options.
“HOOKER MEDITATION EXERCISE”
Annie Rose Malamet, HD video, 6 minutes 6 seconds, 2016
In January 2016 I was illegally evicted from my apartment for being a sex worker. HOOKER MEDIATION EXERCISE examines anonymity, fear, and visibility in relation to sex work. I use my own advertisements, client voicemails, and original footage to create a narrative of my time spent in exile to the fringes of polite society. It is a piece about the anxiety of being discovered and a reflection on my own identity as a feminist whore. … Net art produced by sex workers is inherently disruptive to the digital landscape. Our innate visual vulnerability leaves us open not only to sexual harassment (which almost all women on the Internet experience), but also to legal repercussions. To be visible as a sex worker is to live in fear. To hide our identities furthers feelings of alienation, isolation, and increases the risk of violence we face. HOOKER MEDITATION EXERCISE bemoans this existence.
“Siri [iOS9.2.1] is a racist and he meant it”
Jung Hee Mun, HD video, 2 minutes 38 seconds, 2016
I perform a remedial interview with Siri over how to pronounce my name Jung, in Korean pronunciation.
“Simon [Non-Linear Relationship]”
Jung Hee Mun, HD video, 33 seconds, 2015
Do participate in a non-linear relationship, Break every ascending vertical systems, Understand the meaning of your being, Regress from calculated linear relationship, What you believe is real, but it no longer holds validity of this very moment of the present, Express yourself.
“In doing so, you become the monster you are trying to combat”
Sarada Rauch, HD video, 3 minutes 37 seconds, 2015
Collapsing the personal and mediated experience through reenactment, I examine the construction of histories and institutional narratives. “In doing so, you become the monster you are trying to combat” mimics the various methods of subliminal messages in commercial media. Drawing upon my own cultural background, the cinematic landscape scenes are interrupted by a quick succession of video frames of my performative reinterpretation of the third episode of the Devi Mahatmyam. My aim was to create a feeling of discomfort and unease underneath the surface while the main visuals were cinematic and bucolic. The dance is based on NFL victory dances, the landscape is footage I shot of several miniature terrains, and the soundscape is a mix of midi drums and stringed instruments as well as audio from people’s protests in Istanbul, Tahir and Ferguson.
“Monument Feed”
Josh Sender, HD video, 15 seconds, 2014
Photographs were created by picking fragments from the first listed image on the wikipedia article for ‘Monument.’ The first photograph is of a Harvest Moon rising over Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and US Capitol. Each fragmented image’s field was digitally expanded on, positioning it in a new focus as something much smaller but grander.
“Maps to the In-Between”
Katya Yakubov, HD video, 7 minutes 23 seconds, 2015
A mining of a digital space finds characters and forms in dialogue, and a playful hint of narrative begins to emerge in this twice-appropriated landscape. Eventually, the great Apparition lets it all fall down.
Still from “In doing so, you become the monster you are trying to combat” (Sarada Rauch, 2015) – Image courtesy of the artist
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Lana Z Caplan is a film/videomaker, photographer, and installation artist. Her work has been recognized by awards at various exhibitions and festivals, including the Director’s Prize at Black Maria Film Festival and Audience Award at the Crossroads Film Festival in San Francisco. Other notable exhibitions and festivals include Edinburgh International Film Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland), L’Alternativa Independent Film Festival (Barcelona, Spain), Anthology Film Archives (NY, NY), Inside Out Art Museum (Beijing, China), National Gallery (San Juan, PR), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque, NM), MadCat Women’s International Film Festival (San Francisco, CA), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, (Mexico City). Caplan earned her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and BA from Boston University. She has served on the faculty of several colleges including Massachusetts College of Art and Design and University of California, San Diego and is currently an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.She is the recipient of several grants including from Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Puffin Foundation, and the Film/Video Studio Program Fellowship at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus OH. Her work has been reviewed in various journals and periodicals including ARTnews,The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, and The New York Sun.
Sasha Waters Freyer is a moving image artist trained in photography and the documentary tradition who fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and digital media. In 2016, she received the Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium; was a finalist for the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and was awarded Best in Show at New Waves a juried exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2015, she received a Media Arts grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. Her past projects have screened at renowned international film festivals such as Rotterdam, Telluride, Tribeca, Kassel Dokfest, and IMAGES in Toronto; in museums such as the Pacific Film Archives, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit; on international public and cable television and in microcinemas, basements and county libraries. Her 16mm and digital films been reviewed in ArtForum, The New Yorker, Variety, IndieWIRE and Mother Jones. She is a past fellow of The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and serves as the Chair of the Department of Photography + Film at VCU.
Jeremiah Jones (b. 1980, Washington State) is an artist, ex-con, post-activist, now posing as posh-dandy engaged in precarious sojourns. He creates paintings, objects and videos that explore the complex histories, landscapes and relationships that form our world. His process includes research, field production, and found images to create complex works that bring to bear contemporary systems and mythologies, incorporating seductive and beautiful formal experiments utilizing projected light and sound. He holds a B.A. from the Evergreen State College, and an M.F.A. from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at The Tacoma Art Museum, The Hyde Park Art Center, The Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as numerous independent art spaces and private collections in LA, New York, Chicago and internationally.
Annie Rose Malamet is a visual artist, writer, and curator living and working in Brooklyn. In 2012, she graduated from Marlboro College with a BA in Art History and Visual Art. She later earned her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in 2015. Her current artistic interests include beauty politics, digital trauma, and anonymity and sex work.
Jung Hee Mun is a multimedia artist based in NYC. She born in Seoul, South Korea and migrated to the United States of America at the age of nineteen to study visual arts. Mun earned her Master’s degree in Fine Arts with a focus in an interdisciplinary practice from School of Visual Arts in NYC and Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in printmaking installation from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Mun explores issues of identity, violence, information infrastructure and sociopolitical ideologies in forms of fictions and dreams in the presence of technological era. She finds interactive projection, participatory performance, video, photography based on electronics and computer programming language are suited to express her concepts. She has had solo exhibitions at the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art, Sala Diaz, Fl!ght Gallery, and Cactus Bra; group exhibitions at the McNay Museum of Art, BlueStar Contemporary Art Museum, School of Visual Arts, Women, Their Work in Texas and various venues in NYC. Her work is included in the collection of the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Sarada Rauch is an artist, poet and musician born in Los Angeles and based in Brooklyn. Through reenactment, her work collapses the personal experience with the mediated experience, to examine the construction of histories and institutional narratives. She has exhibited internationally in spaces such as The Drawing Center, New York; Novella Gallery, New York; RH+ Gallery, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Central St. Martins, London; La Conservera Center of Contemporary Art, Cueti; Demarco Art House, Edinburgh; and the RISD Museum, Providence. Artist residencies she has participated in include Open Sessions at the Drawing Center, New York; The LMCC Swing Space, New York; Center for Book Arts Workspace Residency, New York; Latitude 53, Edmonton; and she received the BBK Saxony Fellowship in Leipzig. Sarada was one of the directors of Heliopolis Gallery in Brooklyn, and is a co-creator of the art podcast called Around About.
Josh Sender (b. 1991, New York) is an artist working with images, mostly online. He recently completed his Multidisciplinary MFA at the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He currently runs Nevver.Work, a digital exhibition space. Sender has ha d solo exhibitions in Baltimore and New Jersey, and has also been included in group shows in New York, South Korea, Baltimore and New Jersey. Most recently he showed as part of ‘Cold Open Verse,’ a screening at Printed Matter’s 2016 New York Art Book Fair at MOMA/PS1, curated by Blonde Art Books and Poet Transmit.
Katya Yakubov is a Uzbekistan-born filmmaker living in Richmond, VA. She graduated from Tisch School of the Arts and served as assistant curator for VAEFF 2013. Her short films have screened at EFFPortland, Alchemy Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground, and various other festivals. From 2014-2015, she and partner Daniel Hess opened a microcinema in Brooklyn, NY, called The Picture Show, dedicated to screening visionary narrative and experimental films. Her own work explores how a stable view of time and fixed notions of identity can be undermined by photographic, abstract storytelling. She is currently pursuing an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Still from “HOOKER MEDITATION EXERCISE” (Annie Rose Malamet, 2016) – courtesy of the artist
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Microscope Gallery Events Series 2016 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). With the underwriting support of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation.
